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

Benjamin H Paffhausen,Peter Stieber,Karén Haink,Jana Čavojská,Zhengwei Wang,Simon Menzel,Anja Voigt,Randolf Menzel,Timo A Stein,Julian Petrasch,Aron Duer,Morgan Geldenhuys,Sophia Wutke,Josephine Coburn,Uwe Greggers

doi:10.3389/fnbeh.2021.647224

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.

Highlights

A honeybee colony is a well-organized unit of social life that is composed of highly interacting groups of single organisms with different duties, age-dependent behavioral routines, and experience
These are electrostatic signals that workers produce due to their body movements, e.g., their dances, shivering to control temperature, fanning behavior to regulate hive humidity and CO2, ‘‘stop’’ and ‘‘whooping’’ signals, and overall motor activities characteristic of Eavesdropping on Honeybee Communication arousal states, preparation for play flights of young bees, and preparation for swarming
We found that electrostatic fields (ESF) signals tightly mirror biologically relevant conditions and will allow unsupervised long-term monitoring of health conditions in honeybee colonies

Summary

INTRODUCTION

A honeybee colony is a well-organized unit of social life that is composed of highly interacting groups of single organisms with different duties, age-dependent behavioral routines, and experience. The health of honeybee colonies, and their pollination efficiency depends on multiple components including season, environmental conditions, bee keeping activities, infections by parasites (viruses, bacteria, fungi, mites), and exposure of/to insecticides (Chauzat et al, 2010; Moritz et al, 2010; Morawetz et al, 2019) The latter conditions are relevant in modern agricultures since many insecticides (e.g., neonicotinoids) act directly on the nervous system of honeybees (Eiri and Nieh, 2012; Casida and Durkin, 2013), and have been found to compromise foraging activity and navigation, and dance communication (Van der Sluijs et al, 2015; Tison et al, 2020). Other insect pollinators (butterflies, beetles, flies, solitary bee) are affected by insecticides, and monitoring the effect of insecticides on honeybee communication may provide information beyond honeybee pollination activities (Pisa et al, 2015) In this sense, ESF measurements in honeybee colonies offer access to biologically and environmentally relevant data about the health condition of ecosystems. We found that ESF signals tightly mirror biologically relevant conditions and will allow unsupervised long-term monitoring of health conditions in honeybee colonies

MATERIALS AND METHODS

RESULTS

DISCUSSION

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT