Colony collapse disorder had been wreaking havoc on bee populations and puzzling scientists, but new research may have uncovered the cause.
Scientists used radio tracking to follow thousands of bees in order to track their lives and map their decline; they found that the bees reacted to stress by starting to forage at a younger age, Macquarie University reported. This behavior is problematic because the precocious foragers tended to complete fewer foraging trips in their lifetime and died at an earlier age, leading to structural collapse within their colonies.
"Bee colonies contain a precise balance of bees [specialized] in the different roles the society needs. If that balance is upset by young bees starting to forage early, sometimes the colony cannot cope," said Andrew Barron of Macquarie University's Department of Biological Sciences. "There is a breakdown in division of labor, and loss of the adult population, leaving only brood, food and few adults in the hive."
These new insights into the global problem of colony collapse disorder could help researchers come up with new strategies to fight it such as providing "rescue packages" for threatened communities and installing sensors to detect when a colony is rapidly declining.
"Since 2007 [Barron] and his team have been studying how animals with small brains are capable of solving complex problems. In particular, their exploration of the neurobiology of major behavioural systems in bees is becoming foundational work for understanding and developing more complex neurological systems, such as a bionic human brain. In 2015 [Barron] was awarded an ARC Future Fellowship to develop a computational model of the honey bee brain," the researchers noted.
The findings were published in a recent edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
