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Several hundred bees in rural Pennsylvania and rural New York are sporting tiny QR codes on their backs to track when they go in and out of their hives. The work, a collaboration among entomologists and electrical engineers at Penn State, is the first step in solving a long-standing mystery of how far bees travel from their hives to collect pollen and nectar. 

Couple key points:

• The researchers found that most trips typically lasted one to four minutes, which could be to check the weather prior to foraging or to defecate outside of the hive. Longer trips typically lasted less than 20 minutes, but 34% of the tagged bees spent more than two hours away from the hive.

• “We also found that bees are foraging for a lot longer over their lifetimes than initially thought,” said Underwood, explaining that honey bees are believed to live for about 28 days. “We’re seeing bees foraging for six weeks, and they don’t start foraging until they are already about two weeks old, so they live a lot longer than we thought.”