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back to article Boffins unwrap honeybee black box recorder project

Scientists want to electronically tag the world’s honeybees in a bid to understand the mass death of entire populations. The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Australia has called for a global project fitting bees with micro-sized RFID chips to gather critical data. Data would be …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    RFID is the wrong technology...

    ...surely it should be ZigBee?

    13 0 Reply
  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Environmental stresses

    I wonder how much additional stress carrying that RFID tag puts on the bees?

    11 0 Reply
    1. Captain Scarlet
      Reply Icon

      Re: Environmental stresses

      Ah you beat me to it.

      There must be better ways than slapping an electronic tag on them

      3 0 Reply
  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Re. Environmental stresses

    Not much, about the same as a dozen mites IIRC.

    An average bee can already carry a fair amount of pollen so it shouldn't affect it much.

    I'd be intrigued to see how they intend to track "lost" bees, are they going to be installing coils along the flight path maybe and simply measuring the drop in resonant tank power (see "Grid-dip meter") as a bee or 3 goes past.

    0 0 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Headmaster

      Re: Re. Environmental stresses

      Assumptions are the mother of... bee hive collapses?

      It's very very hard to make any observation without effecting the subject we are observing.

      0 0 Reply
  4. Graham Marsden
    Joke

    Black Boxes for Bees

    It's a well known* fact that, aerodynamically, bees cannot fly, so obviously this is to find out why they're crashing...

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    * Yes, I *know* it's a myth!

    1 0 Reply
  5. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    RF kills bees?

    So putting a transmitter at the hive entrance is probably the best way to kill them all, right?

    4 0 Reply
  6. JassMan
    Joke

    That's some processor

    Interesting that the chip has a "duel-core CPU". Is there enough room in there for a sword, or do they have to use bee sized pistols at dawn. We need more facts. Does it have an RTC with alarm function or are the bees expected to wake up with the sun.

    1 0 Reply
    1. druck Silver badge
      Reply Icon
      Joke

      Re: That's some processor

      I've heard of resource contention, but duel-core is the best ever way of describing access that limited amount of shared L2 cache!

      2 0 Reply
  7. ravenviz Silver badge
    Black Helicopters

    Eric the half a bee

    Is this wretched demi-bee

    Half asleep upon my knee

    Some freak from a menagerie?

    No! It's Eric, the half a bee

    2 0 Reply
  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Oh

    Beehave.

    But yeah, one would expect the transmitter to be a fair distance from the hive.

    One hypothesis for CCD is that bees *really* hate thunderstorms and high winds, causing them to literally run out of energy (think car running on empty) over water and drown or become disoriented and end up at the wrong hive (sting death) or worse as food for something that eats bees.

    Its also possible that neonics are just one too many bad things o tolerate, Varroa + deformed wing + foulbrood is pretty bad already and the lack of decent foraging within sensible distance makes things worse.

    1 0 Reply
  9. ChaosFreak
    Facepalm

    Measuring Stress?

    I wonder if this project also measures the stress on bees of having an RFID chip glued to their bodies...

    0 0 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Measuring Stress?

      IIRC they cool the bee down inducing torpor, clean off any wax residues then use a fast reacting contact glue (less heat y'see) to attach the tag to the midsection above the wings within minutes. The bee doesen't seem to mind this much, see http://www.coloss.org/beebook/I/behavioural-studies/12/4/3

      A fair percentage of bees do survive this, around 80-95% depending on the skill of the surgeon.

      Also injured bees typically can't fly at all even badly so they can run tests to see if Zippy the Lojacked Bee and his 10,000 buddies are still able to fly properly.

      Even more interesting, one set of bees are being tagged near Chernobyl to see what radiation does to their flight range/etc.

      0 0 Reply

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