Professor Juergen Tautz and his team at the University of Wurzburg in Germany are studying the health of more than 150,000 bees, in the hope of halting the apparently inexorable decline in their worldwide population.
Bees have always been tricky to study individually.
Each colony has around 50,000 members, all interacting simultaneously and making it near-impossible to observe them.
Previously, each bee would be painted with a different-coloured dot on its back and scientists would video the colony — watching the tape endlessly, to try to work out the behaviour in each insect.
But a revolutionary technology enables the study of bees at close quarters. As soon as a bee hatches, a tiny radio frequency identification (RFID) microchip is stuck to its back using a lacquer.
This allows scientists to study its behaviour throughout its life.
The bee will be unaware of the chip as it weighs only 2mg — a typical bee weighing in at 70mg can carry its own body weight.
A honeybee carrying two balls of pollen it has collected
Once it has been chipped, each bee has a serial number, and a scanner on the outside of the hive (like a supermarket one) registers its movement every time it leaves or enters.
The data allows scientists to determine the health of every bee — how many trips it is taking, how soon after hatching it collects pollen and how much food it gathers.
The scientists also hope to discover why some bees live for just four weeks and others up to ten months.
They also put the bees through a rigorous programme in the hope of training them to be ‘sniffer bees’ capable of detecting explosives and suicide bombers.
The bees are conditioned to stick out their tongues (or proboscis) when they detect a certain scent — for example, that of explosives.
Each time they do so, they receive a drop of their favourite tipple — sugar solution — and they rapidly learn to associate the smell with receiving food.
Before long, they will stick out their tongues whenever the scent of explosives is present, in anticipation of the sugar.
And by watching their tongues, scientists can use them as sniffer bees. There are three colonies involved in this scheme — involving 150,000 bees — but it can be expensive.
Although the microchips cost just £1.20 each, they are lost for ever once the bees die outside the hive.
