Researchers Set Out To Track Zombie Bees’ Flight Lee Rannals for
redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Biologists are conducting an
elaborate experiment by tagging infected “Zombie” bees with tiny
radio trackers and monitoring the insects’ movements. The
infected bees would abandon their hives and congregate near
outside lights, moving in increasingly erratic circles on the
ground before dying. In order to better understand how the
parasitic fly affects the bees’ behavior, the team built a
system to track the movements of infected bees in and out of a
hive. Each bee has a set of tiny radio frequency trackers
attached to the top of its thorax. When the bees leave and
return to the hive, they come back through a small tube
outfitted with dual laser readers that interact with the
individual trackers. The readers create “virtually a 24-hour
record of bees going in and out of the hive to forage,”
Christopher Quock, a San Francisco State University master’s
biology student working on the hive’s design together with b