Although there is still no concrete position as to why bees are dying out, the emerging consensus is that it is a result of a whole host of stresses, Paulo de Souza, chief executive science leader at CSIRO, told Mashable.
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Scientists from Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) are leading the Global Initiative for Honey bee Health, a multi-national effort to find a solution to the widespread deaths the species in recent years.
The technology was originally used in Hobard, Tasmania, where more than 10,000 bees are flying around with sensors on their backs.
The sensors, no bigger than a grain of rice, will track all the bees’ movements in and out of their beehives, beaming back information to scientists.
Scientists said the RFID works like a license plate or e-tag with each individual bee having an individual code and they can follow when the bee leaves its hive until it returns.
Bees in the U.S. and Australia are not as aggressive and this technique works, but in Brazil, researchers must but the bees in the refrigerator were they fall asleep and then they can be outfitted with their micro-sensors.
The agency’s scientists said that the number of wild bees in different parts of the world have significantly dropped as a outcome of diseases, habitat loss and the continued use of pesticides.
The bee backpacks are the latest innovation in a series of high-tech tracking devices and sensors created to both study and protect declining animal populations.
“What we are gathering with the sensors is environmental information from where the bees have been”, Gary Fitt, science director of the CSIRO’s health and biosecurity division, told the wire service.
In China, people are starting to do their own pollination by hand.
The task of attaching the “backpacks” to thousands of bees is not an easy task, as it requires holding down each bee and attaching the 2.2-mm device with super glue, The Sydney Morning Herald learned.
As bees are normally predictable creatures, changes in their behaviour indicate stress factors or a change in their environment.
Intel’s Edison boards were used for the sensors since it consumes as little energy as possible while being powered by solar panels and has wireless capabilities to transmit the data.
It all has to do with something called colony collapse disorder (CCD).
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CSIRO Pollination Researcher, Dr Saul Cunningham, said Australia has been very lucky, so far, to be the only country that doesn’t have the devastating Varroa mite, which has wiped out bee colonies overseas at an alarming rate. However, Australian honey bees have not fallen victim to the mite.
