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Evaluating the foraging performance of individual honey bees in different environments with automated field RFID systems
Citation
Colin, T and Warren, RJ and Quarrell, SR and Allen, GR and Barron, AB, Evaluating the foraging performance of individual honey bees in different environments with automated field RFID systems, Ecosphere, 13, (5) Article e4088. ISSN 2150-8925 (2022) [Refereed Article]
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Copyright Statement
Copyright 2022 The Authors. Ecosphere published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of The Ecological Society of America Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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.
Item Details
| Item Type: | Refereed Article |
|---|---|
| Keywords: | Apis mellifera, bee longevity, flight ontogeny, foraging performance, pollination performance, radio frequency identification (RFID), temporal polyethism |
| Research Division: | Agricultural, Veterinary and Food Sciences |
| Research Group: | Crop and pasture production |
| Research Field: | Pollination biology and systems |
| Objective Division: | Animal Production and Animal Primary Products |
| Objective Group: | Livestock raising |
| Objective Field: | Insects |
| UTAS Author: | Warren, RJ (Mr Ryan Warren) |
| UTAS Author: | Quarrell, SR (Dr Stephen Quarrell) |
| UTAS Author: | Allen, GR (Associate Professor Geoff Allen) |
| ID Code: | 150097 |
| Year Published: | 2022 |
| Deposited By: | TIA - Research Institute |
| Deposited On: | 2022-05-20 |
| Last Modified: | 2022-08-23 |
| Downloads: | 3 View Download Statistics |
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