JAMES Cook University researchers are gluing tiny transmitters to the backs of bees to analyse how diseases affect the insect.
The team glued Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) chips to the backs of 960 bees, which Cairns-based lead researcher Dr Lori Lach says involved holding the bees and hoping the glue dried quickly.
"It was actually quite a process - they had to be individually painted, then individually fed, then the tag glued on," Dr Lach said.
"Then individually scanned so we knew which tag was on what color and treatment bee and which hive it was going into.
"It all had to happen within about eight hours of emergence because as the day goes on they start learning how to fly and they get better at stinging.”
The technology allows the bees to be monitored individually for the first time.
“No one had looked at bees at this level before, to see what individual bees do when they are sick,” Dr Lach said.
Scientists infected half the insects with a low dose of nosema spores, a gut parasite common amongst adult honeybees, while the rest remained disease free.
Using the RFID tags in combination with observations at the hives and artificial flowers, the researchers were able to see how hard the bees worked and what kind of material they gathered.
The species of nosema used in the study (Nosema apis) has long been thought to be benign compared to the many other parasites and pathogens that infect honey bees, and no one had previously looked for the effect of nosema on behavior with such a low dose.
“We knew dead bees couldn’t forage or pollinate,” Dr Lach said.
“But what we wanted to investigate was the behavior of live bees that are affected by non-lethal stressors.”
In a just published paper, researchers say infected bees were 4.3 times less likely to be carrying pollen than uninfected bees, and carried less pollen when they did.
Infected bees also started working later, stopped working sooner and died younger.
