'Social and Behavioral Science: Monitoring Social Foraging Behavior in a Biological Model System'

The Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP) is designed to improve the capabilities of U.S. Universities to conduct research and to educate scientists and engineers in selected technical areas of importance to national defense. DURIP funding provides for the acquisition of research equipment and instrumentation for this purpose. The aim of this project is to record honey bee foraging behavior through a Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) monitoring system and to train students in the use of this technology and in the science underlying honey bee behavior. This will enable basic scientific advances in how honey bees adapt behaviorally to different stressors. Most notably, it will examine how early life stress leads to later health outcomes in life and how low stress exposure acts to enhance later stress resistance and life outcomes. It will also facilitate the assessment of the social connectivity of individual bees, thought to be a key aspect of stress adaptation. In addition, it's important to note that food security for human populations depends on pollination achieved to a large extent through honey bee populations, which are currently at risk. Consequently, this research will facilitate our understanding of the extent of those risks and the dynamics underlying them. The Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology that will be used in this project makes automated recordings of honey bee foraging behavior possible and generates further basic scientific insight on honey bee health. This is a major step forward over typical approaches to studying honey bees in which thousands of data points through observation were obtained, cleaned, and processed. This prior technology has demonstrated known inaccuracies. In contrast, the RFID equipment involves computerized recording and analysis, generating higher accuracy and more rapid analytic throughput. The result will enable better estimations of stress and stress adaptation by honey bee populations and reveal new insights on the social dynamics in a resource-dependent population. These results could be generalizable to other social populations (including humans). An interesting relation between honey bee groups and human groups is the stratification (i.e., caste system) that characterizes both and leads to some actors in the groups being more susceptible to disease and other risks. The RFID technology enables tagging insects with transponders that can detect millimeter-level spatial adjustments to track movements (both individual and groups).