Tiny sensors monitor honey bee behaviour

NARRATOR: Honey bees are the great unsung hero of the Australian landscape. While they busily go about their business of foraging, collecting pollen and producing honey, they’re also helping to produce the foods we eat every day. In fact, one third of what goes into our mouths relies on pollination, a service these winged insects provide for free. 

PETER NORRIS, Beekeeper: Bees are just so important to our wellbeing. Things that are immediately obvious are pome fruits, and stone fruits, and berries, and things like that. But things that aren’t so immediately obvious are beef, because they need lucerne and clover, and all those crops need pollinating with bees as well. 

NARRATOR: Sadly, honey bee populations around the world have crashed.

DR GEOFF ALLEN, University of Tasmania: In the case of bees, there’s a number of different issues going on around the world. A particular one is around Colony Collapse Disorder and the issues around also biosecurity and pathogens and Varroa mite in bees.

NARRATOR: Currently, Australia is free from Colony Collapse Disorder and Varroa mite. But the risk of them ariving is very real. 

PETER NORRIS: Oh, catastrophic, absolutely catastrophic. I was in the UK when Varroa arrived there and I had 150 hives as a hobby, and I went down to 25 hives in the first year. We lost 80 per cent of the bees in the UK in the first year it was discovered. 

NARRATOR: A new CSIRO led research program is looking into how to maintain honey bee productivity on farms in the event of a bee population crash, as well as learn about what is driving the global collapse in wild populations. And to do that requires technology on a miniature scale. These tags measure just a quarter of a centimetre in length and are being fitted to the backs of wild bees to monitor their movement in the landscape.  

DR PAULO DE SOUZA, Science Leader CSIRO: We can have sensors in thousands of bees at the same time, and we will be able to monitor what each bee is doing in their environment. And this is absolutely new. We can really review a completely new world about the bees, and how they behave, and what they can do.

NARRATOR: The sensors act like an e-tag on your car and record when the insect passes a data logger. That information is sent remotely to a central location where researchers can then model the insect’s behaviour and how it interacts with its environment. Five thousand of the sensors are being fitted to Tasmanian bees as part of the research program which includes the University of Tasmania, Tasmanian Beekeepers Association, and fruit growers, like John Evans.

JOHN EVANS, Apple grower: Well without bees we don’t have apples, and we’ve seen in the footage before where the bees are not being active because of bad weather and there’s no apples there. So the bee is very important. 

DR PAULO DE SOUZA: So we work with the industry to bring the impact and to solve the problems they have. We’re not building sensors, we’re building the future of Australia. 

NARRATOR: Honey bees are just the starting point for this technology. 

DR STEPHEN QUARELL, University of Tasmania: And we could use it to observe, say, pest movement, so fruit flies, moths, like coddling moth in orchards, but also disease vectors like malaria-carrying mosquitoes, or the sky is the limit really. Anything that moves, we can tag it.

DR PAUL DE BARRO, Senior Research Scientist CSIRO: Oh, these are game changers. Being able to gather real-time information about where insects are and how they’re reacting or interacting with their environment will just change the way that we understand insects’ behaviour and ecology. It’d be hard pressed to think of any area of biology and ecology that won’t benefit from this sort of technology.