The Electronic Bee Spy: Eavesdropping on Honeybee Communication via Electrostatic Field Recordings

Paffhausen, Benjamin H. and Petrasch, Julian and Greggers, Uwe and Duer, Aron and Wang, Zhengwei and Menzel, Simon and Stieber, Peter and Haink, Karén and Geldenhuys, Morgan and Čavojská, Jana and Stein, Timo A. and Wutke, Sophia and Voigt, Anja and Coburn, Josephine and Menzel, Randolf (2021) The Electronic Bee Spy: Eavesdropping on Honeybee Communication via Electrostatic Field Recordings. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 15. ISSN 1662-5153

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Abstract

As a canary in a coalmine warns of dwindling breathable air, the honeybee can indicate the health of an ecosystem. Honeybees are the most important pollinators of fruit-bearing flowers, and share similar ecological niches with many other pollinators; therefore, the health of a honeybee colony can reflect the conditions of a whole ecosystem. The health of a colony may be mirrored in social signals that bees exchange during their sophisticated body movements such as the waggle dance. To observe these changes, we developed an automatic system that records and quantifies social signals under normal beekeeping conditions. Here, we describe the system and report representative cases of normal social behavior in honeybees. Our approach utilizes the fact that honeybee bodies are electrically charged by friction during flight and inside the colony, and thus they emanate characteristic electrostatic fields when they move their bodies. These signals, together with physical measurements inside and outside the colony (temperature, humidity, weight of the hive, and activity at the hive entrance) will allow quantification of normal and detrimental conditions of the whole colony. The information provided instructs how to setup the recording device, how to install it in a normal bee colony, and how to interpret its data.

Item Type: Article
Subjects: Opene Prints > Biological Science
Depositing User: Managing Editor
Date Deposited: 10 Feb 2023 07:16
Last Modified: 29 Jul 2024 07:53
URI: http://geographical.go2journals.com/id/eprint/916

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