We created the World's first tweeting bumblebees, and went on to win the Internet of Things Award (Environmental) 2012! Thank you to our readers for your votes!
Introduction
Our Bumblebee nesting project started in 2011 as a bit of conservation to help the declining bumblebee population by encouraging one (or more) to nest in boxes in our garden. We discovered it's not easy, and our project quickly evolved into an ongoing and intimate study of these amazing creatures, which we are sharing here for the benefit of all.
Amongst our unexpected successes are:
A short clip in the film "Britain in a Day" by Ridley Scott (Broadcast by the BBC in 2012)
Featured in Wired Magazine for creating the World's first tweeting bumblebees
Winner of the Internet of Things award 2012 - Environmental Category
Oldest recorded age we can find of a worker Bufftailed Bumblebee - at 103 days
We've discovered, observed and collected a sizeable amount of real-world data, still being analysed and written up (Overview here). Additionally,
We've sourced several live colonies from commercial providers and have been looking after numerous disabled bees indoors.
We've learnt to recognise individual bees, spot specific/individual behaviour patterns
We measured efficiency and can predict some of their behaviour triggers.
You can also follow BeeBoxALula on twitter where our bumblebees tweet live for themselves!
Insights
We're also using tech to monitor the lives of our bumblebees - visual, audio, temperature, sunlight, weather. We can see how the environment impacts their behaviour and understand, capture and share the marvels of their secret lives.
As a species under great threat, we've brought the critical study of Bumblebees into the Multimedia age and revealed intriguing and new insights based on direct observation.
I'm thrilled to report that our bumblebees were voted by readers as the winner for the 2012 Internet of Things award in the Environmental category! This is a great end to a busy year with the bumblebees, where I installed a lot more technology to monitor their behaviours and environment.
It turned out that for the main colony (as widely reported) it was actually a pretty disastrous year. Foraging proved difficult with so much rain and we had a brood of about 20 early queens in April that all left the nest - none were produced over the summer.
One surviving queen did seem to have an attempt to build a second colony, but it was doomed as no workers emerged and her honey supplies were robbed by other bumblebees.
So, 2012 proved to be quite a different year to 2011, with no colony activity beyond August (November in 2011) - but with the added delights of a short spot in the BBC's Britain in a Day film and the IOT award to round things off!
Newscientist are running a competition to win an amazing Parrot AR Drone helicopter as part of the Ig Noble awards. This brilliant device can be controlled from your iPhone and features 2 onboard cameras.
Naturally I knew straight away what I could use it for. They are after a creative, scientific and fun use. Well, for me, that's bumblebee research - here's my submission:
I would like to use the AR Drone to further our research of Bumblebees. Here's a link to our current project http://www.beejuu.com
Through our current work we have established behaviour patterns of bumblebees in the wild, such as when they leave and return to their nest and what triggers them to do so. They exhibit some remarkable behaviour - for example, here is a video showing a new baby "memorising" the nest location on its first flight:
it only does this once and it has learned where the nest is - it can then fly off.
(here is a montage set to music of lots of them doing it: )
The problem is - we don't know what happens next. In some situations we are able to time how long their trips away from the nest are, and also the colour of the pollen they bring back may give an indication of where they go. But in truth, we don't really know how far they go and we don't know whether their initial flights differ from their "established" flights. How do new baby bumblebees learn what to do?
For example - is their first flight just a short test flight?
We need the Drone to track and follow bees and find where they forage. We would like to understand what distance they fly, what patterns are exhibited by the locations they choose (e.g. are they all disperse or clumped together) - and for this we need to locate, view and measure them in foraging locations. We believe the drone could be used for this - either to spot & count marked bees in known locations or to attempt to track (probably harder) individual bees.
Although that sounds far fetched, there will be occasions when that is very possible. For example, when Queen bumblebees are searching for nest sites or hiberation sites. It is notoriously difficult to track this behaviour, although during spring we manually tracked some nest-searching queens, manually running along fields and ditches to note locations. They search along embankments, close to the ground. One issue is that the Queen can just choose to fly over a ditch or fence or over dense undergrowth to look for her next spot and you have lost her. It might only be 20 feet away, but you cannot follow.
We would like to research the locations that queens choose and how many they look for before finding a successful nest site. This would help us research and gauge the ongoing loss of bumblebee nest sites. Here, for example, is a video of a "cuckoo" bumblebee searching for an established nest to take over & evict..
This type of behaviour is extremely hard to follow on foot due to terrain - the drone could solve this problem, allowing us to chart activity levels, preferred sites and success rates. This would contribute new data to the field of bumbleebee research.
