Honeybees are notoriously difficult to study, altering their natural behavior when external influences are sensed, but are also highly susceptible to colony collapse due to cold weather. When the hive temperature drops below 50 °F (10 °C), the bees stop singing and fever and enter a fatal cold coma.
So in a win for both bees and ecologists, a team of roboticists and biologists from Ecole Polytechnic Federal de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland and the University of Graz in Austria have developed a robotic honeycomb that keeps bees warm. . Coldsnap and you can also study them.
The beehive robotic device was designed to unobtrusively slip into an existing hive, with a central processing unit coordinating sensors, sending commands to actuators and sending data to a team watching from afar. A robotic honeycomb equipped with temperature sensors and actuators could measure and steer bee behavior by switching the local temperature.
“Many rules of bee society are regulated by temperature, from collective and individual interactions to the development of healthy chicks, so this study took advantage of that,” says a PhD student at EPFL. explained lead author Rafael Barmak. “Thermal sensors create a snapshot of the collective behavior of the bees, and the actuators allow us to influence bee movement by modulating the thermal field.”
Heat is also channeled into the robotic-connected honeycombs, gentle enough not to bother the bees, but allowing scientists to regulate the colony’s body temperature. He tested the system with 4,000 bees and found that he was able to keep the colony alive from 2020 when the cold snap of 2021 killed a nearby hive. I was.
“Previous studies on the thermal behavior of bees in winter have relied on either observing the bees or manipulating the outside temperature,” added Martin Stephanek of the University of Graz. “Our robotic system allows us to change the temperature from within the cluster, where we can emulate the heating behavior of core honeybees to study how winter clusters actively regulate their temperature.”
“Biohybrid super-organisms” are an exciting step for studying populations that positively and lightly influence behavior rather than unbalance or disrupt animal communities.
“By collecting data on the location of the bees and creating warm areas within the hive, we can get the bees to move around in ways they would normally never do in nature during the winter, when they tend to swarm to save energy. Now,” said Francesco Mondada, Head of Mobile Robotic Systems Group. “This gives them the potential to act on their behalf, for example by directing them toward food sources or discouraging them from splitting into groups that are too small to threaten their survival.”
Also, by dispersing heat through actuators, scientists were also able to extend the survival of colonies, even though they lost their queens. , shows the potential to mitigate colony collapse due to cold coma, and provides new behavioral insights and knowledge for conservation scientists.
The study was published in a journal science robotics.
Source: Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne
