Bees are dying all around us and something must be done

Aug 26, 2015 20:54 GMT  ·  By

Apparently, there is a bees catastrophe right under our eyes, without the public having any idea about it. Worldwide bee colonies are experiencing a mass death event, a phenomenon that is called colony collapse disorder.

Being a phenomenon that affects the Western Honeybee (Apis mellifera), it intrigued scientists across the globe since the whole phenomenon started almost ten years ago. The colony collapse disorder means a mass extinction of worker bees in a colony, leaving only the queen and some nursing bees to fend for the colony, leading inevitably to the loss of the entire colony.

However, the causes of this phenomenon are unknown, and it may need a much deeper understanding of bees behavior in a way that may elude the naked human eye. To observe the working bees in full detail before they get affected by the syndrome, Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) teamed up with Intel in outfitting the healthy bees with an RFID "backpack" that's a third of their weight and has a battery that can generate power from vibration.

Intel joins in to save the bees from a worldwide mass extinction

Using an Intel Edison-based system to observe every 50 tags, and coupled with an Atom processor, 1GB of memory, 5GB of storage and dual-band WiFi and Bluetooth, CSIRO managed to tag around 10,000 bees in Tasmania, with the research still continuing. The system can analyze the effects of pollution, disease, pesticides, water contamination and many others, in the end figuring what makes them act weirdly and ultimately make them die.

The research will try to study the least affected bees in the world, the ones from Australia that aren’t yet affected by the Verroa mite that killed countless of colonies around the globe. The end purpose is studying how and why healthy bees end up dying all around us for no reason and without being influenced by an external factor like those on other continents.

The results of the research will be shared next year with the global scientific communities in order to stop a mass extinction of bees, since humans depend so much on bees pollinating the food we are eating every single day.