Honeybees are at risk, along with the crops they pollinate. Scientists think the solution lies in the insects’ brains.
PHILADELPHIA — The honeybees looked perfectly healthy, buzzing about their boxy wooden hive on a warm autumn day in central Pennsylvania.Clad in a protective white suit and hat, the biologist reached out with a gloved hand to capture one of the insects in a small vial, then took it back to her Bucknell University laboratory to dissect its brain.
The causes include climate change, pesticides, and disease, said Capaldi, who studies insect behavior and neuroscience at the liberal arts university in Lewisburg. In bad years, the combination of insults can wipe out more than half of a beekeeper’s colonies. The cylindrical device Rovnyak uses to detect these substances, called a spectrometer, would be impractical for any beekeeper or farmer. But once the researchers determine which chemicals are the best predictors of bee health, they want to develop a low-cost test that could be deployed in the real world.
“You can’t just manufacture a bee on a processing line in a factory,” Vranich said. “They have to be bred and given time to develop new hives.”
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