Evaluating the foraging performance of individual honey bees in different environments with automated field RFID systems

Abstract

Measuring individual foraging performance of pollinators is crucial to guide environmental policies that aim at enhancing pollinator health and pollination services. Automated systems have been developed to track the activity of individual honey bees, but their deployment is extremely challenging. This has limited the assessment of individual foraging performance in full‐strength bee colonies in the field. Most studies available to date have been constrained to use downsized bee colonies located in urban and suburban areas. Environmental policy‐making, on the other hand, needs a more comprehensive assessment of honey bee performance in a broader range of environments, including in remote agricultural and wild areas. Here, we detail a new autonomous field method to record high‐quality data on the flight ontogeny and foraging performance of honey bees, using radio frequency identification (RFID). We separate bee traffic into returning and exiting tunnels to improve data quality solving many previous limitations of RFID systems caused by traffic jams and the parasitic coupling of RFID antennae. With this method, we assembled a large RFID dataset made of control bee colonies from experiments conducted in different locations and seasons. We hope our results will be a starting point to understand how ontogenetic and environmental factors affect the individual performance of honey bees and that our method will enable large‐scale replication of individual pollinator performance studies.

Modelling daily weight variation in honey bee hives

“…(ii) Alternatively, by pre-defining one parameter, we calculate the N max value directly because the system of equations presents a unique solution. We focus on the departure rate d because of the consistency among different reported studies on the time interval between trips that a forager bee spends inside the hive [ 37 ] and because d can be directly connected to the simplifying modeling decision of dividing bees into foragers and those that do not leave the hive (i.e., we consider as foragers the most active bees so that collectively their average departure rate is d , the other bees are considered to effectively stay inside the hive, and their weight is counted as part of W 0 ). In practice, we choose d so that the average time spent by forager bees inside the hive between trips is τ d = 0.816 h (the half-life τ is derived from the arrival or departure rate, and defined in Eq (12) below) [ 36 ].…”

“…These estimations align with the results in Refs. [ 36 , 37 , 42 ]. The only hive that shows values up to 6.25 h for trip duration is Hive 8, this hive shows behaviour outside the ones predicted by our model, as evidenced by ∅ in the interval estimation.…”

“…Finally, we test the predictions of our model against independent experimental measures that tracked the number of bees that arrive and depart from a hive at a time interval [ 37 ]. Fig 6b compares these measurements to the assumption in our model and reveals the limitations of our simplifying choice of constant and piece-wise linear arrivals and departures in Eq (7) .…”

“…The time spent by foragers outside the hive τ a can be connected to the efficiency of the colony because long times outside the hive lead to a reduction of the life expectancy of foragers [ 37 ].…”

Impact of isolated and unattractive crops on honeybee foraging: A case study using radio frequency identification and hybrid carrot seed crops

“…Hybrid plant varieties have become an important aspect of modern food production, accounting for an estimated 20% of all crops due to distinct advantages for yield, disease resistance and quality (Broussard et al, 2017;Mas et al, 2018). These hybrid varieties are created by crossing specially bred male plant lines, which do not produce pollen, with fertile pollen bearing female lines (Broussard et al, 2017;Cook et al, 2020;Mas et al, 2018). In these varieties, pollen is transferred between lines by insect pollinators.…”