February 12, 2025

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Navigating around a bee’s point of view – Information Centre – Research & Innovation

For decades, researchers have struggled to fully grasp how bees navigate so proficiently with these types of smaller brains. Now, an EU-funded undertaking has formulated new technologies to improve our knowing and to probably advance initiatives in bee conservation. This new understanding could also be transferred to other sectors, these types of as engineering.


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© badwiser, #343077244 supply:stock.adobe.com 2020

For decades, bee populations have endured a dramatic decrease, which has been a stressing trend for experts and environmentalists, between numerous other folks. We rely on bees for substantially of our food items. Around 70 % of our most well-liked food items crops – including fruits, nuts and veggies – are pollinated by bees which indicates that further reduction in their numbers could threaten food items safety on a world wide scale.

Nevertheless, regardless of the essential function performed by bees in the food items chain, right up until lately almost nothing at all was acknowledged about the techniques they navigate among their hives and the vegetation they pollinate. ‘To fully grasp how close patches of wildflowers or clover have to have to be to sustain pollinator populations, it’s quite essential to fully grasp how considerably bees fly and what their spatial designs are,’ claims Lars Chittka, Professor in Sensory and Behavioural Ecology at Queen Mary College in the United Kingdom.

That is why researchers in the EU’s SpaceRadarPollinator undertaking, funded by the European Study Council, set out to develop new technologies to keep track of unique bees as they transfer close to and then build 3D visualisations of their journeys, in result reconstructing what the environment appears like from a bee’s stage of watch. This 3D reconstruction is essential since it will enable researchers to fully grasp what the bee sees as it is flying and how landmarks and other visual triggers influence its conduct.

Hive of activity

‘It’s exceptional that these bees have brains the measurement of a pinhead yet they handle to navigate with one hundred % reliability about distances of numerous miles, often remembering wherever their house and flower patches are,’ claims Chittka, the project’s principal investigator. ‘There has been a century or a lot more of fascination with this problem but, for the initially time, our undertaking was able to abide by bees all over their full lifetime, from the initially time they left their hives to their demise.’

By attaching miniature transponders to the bees’ backs, researchers have been able to look at wherever and how substantial they travelled in true time. During the undertaking, the SpaceRadarPollinator crew also formulated new radar technologies that authorized the bees’ journeys to be tracked and visualised in 3D fairly than 2nd. Nevertheless, this was not employed in the industry right up until immediately after the undertaking had ended in the summer months of 2019.

As a outcome of this undertaking, researchers are now able to fully grasp how bees shell out the initially hrs of their daily life, checking out their surroundings in loops to locate out wherever close by flowers patches are positioned. For the SpaceRadarPollinator crew, it was considerable how tiny time it took the bees to resolve the ‘travelling salesman problem’ – how to locate the fastest route among flower patches.

‘This is a obstacle that can retain desktops active for quite extended intervals as they test out all the attainable routes,’ explains Chittka. ‘But the bees have been quite speedy at obtaining the optimal alternative, commonly getting only a several hrs.’

These insights have been not the only breakthrough. The SpaceRadarPollinator crew also held a collection of experiments within the laboratory with floor-breaking benefits. By testing bees’ spatial problem-resolving skills, they have been able to create that they could learn to manoeuvre a ball merely by seeing other folks. They have been also able to pull on strings, force caps and even rotate levers to accessibility food items. ‘No a single knew insects could resolve this variety of activity,’ claims Chittka.

Bee-impressed engineering

Many thanks to this undertaking, researchers have substantially improved the knowing of bees’ problem-resolving skills and their each day actions and vacation. In addition to currently being channelled into conservation initiatives to secure pollinator populations throughout Europe, this new understanding could also be transferred to other sectors, these types of as engineering.

Regardless of their measurement, bees’ brains have proved remarkably productive at resolving navigational problems – an perception that researchers approach to test to emulate as they design technologies and products these types of as unmanned cars for catastrophe checking and earthquakes.

Chittka believes that humans even now have a great deal to learn from the humble bee. ‘There is nothing at all in the engineering environment that is as productive and proficiently miniaturised as a bee’s mind,’ he concludes.