Social and Behavioral Science: Monitoring Social Foraging Behavior in a Biological Model System
Abstract
The aim of this project was to establish instrumentation to record honey bee foraging behavior through a Radio-Frequency Identification(RFID) monitoring and to train students in the use of this technology and in the science underlying honey bee behavior. This enables basic scientific advances in how honey bees adapt behaviorally to different stressors. Most notably, it will examine how early life stress and disease lead to later health outcomes in life and how low stress exposure acts to enhance later stress resistance and life outcomes. It will also facilitate the assessment of the social connectivity of individual bees, thought to be a key aspect of stress adaptation. In addition, it's important to note that food security for human populations depends on pollination achieved to a large extent through honey bee populations, which are currently at risk. Consequently, this research facilitates our understanding of the extent of those risks and the dynamics underlying them. The Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology that was used in this project makes automated recordings of honey bee foraging behavior possible and generates further basic scientific insight on honey bee health. This is a major step forward over typical approaches to studying honey bees in which thousands of data points through observation were obtained, cleaned, and processed. This prior technology has demonstrated known inaccuracies. In contrast, the RFID equipment involves computerized recording and analysis, generating higher accuracy and more rapid analytic throughput. The result will enable better estimations of stress and stress adaptation by honey bee populations and reveal new insights on the social dynamics in a resource-dependent population. These results could be generalizable to other social populations (including humans). An interesting relation between honey bee groups and human groups is the stratification (i.e., caste system) that characterizes both and leads to some actors
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Oct 12, 2016
- Accession Number
- AD1032299
Entities
People
- Olav Rueppell
Organizations
- University of North Carolina at Greensboro