We created the World's first tweeting bumblebees, and went on to win the Internet of Things Award (Environmental) 2012! Thank you to our readers for your votes!
Introduction
Our Bumblebee nesting project started in 2011 as a bit of conservation to help the declining bumblebee population by encouraging one (or more) to nest in boxes in our garden. We discovered it's not easy, and our project quickly evolved into an ongoing and intimate study of these amazing creatures, which we are sharing here for the benefit of all.
Amongst our unexpected successes are:
A short clip in the film "Britain in a Day" by Ridley Scott (Broadcast by the BBC in 2012)
Featured in Wired Magazine for creating the World's first tweeting bumblebees
Winner of the Internet of Things award 2012 - Environmental Category
Oldest recorded age we can find of a worker Bufftailed Bumblebee - at 103 days
We've discovered, observed and collected a sizeable amount of real-world data, still being analysed and written up (Overview here). Additionally,
We've sourced several live colonies from commercial providers and have been looking after numerous disabled bees indoors.
We've learnt to recognise individual bees, spot specific/individual behaviour patterns
We measured efficiency and can predict some of their behaviour triggers.
You can also follow BeeBoxALula on twitter where our bumblebees tweet live for themselves!
Insights
We're also using tech to monitor the lives of our bumblebees - visual, audio, temperature, sunlight, weather. We can see how the environment impacts their behaviour and understand, capture and share the marvels of their secret lives.
As a species under great threat, we've brought the critical study of Bumblebees into the Multimedia age and revealed intriguing and new insights based on direct observation.
We thought it was about time to pay a visit to the field over the road where we had spent so long trying to catch queens and where our own brood of bees is now feasting on broad-bean pollen. We thought there might have been a couple of nests there too which we wanted to check out for activity. We couldn't see anything at the supposed nest locations - we might have been unlucky with our timing - or maybe the colonies didn't survive.
Nor could we see much activity in the broad bean field - we were hoping to see some of our own bees. So, it was all seeming a bit fruitless...
That was until we starting walking along the ditch where I had been catching queen bees earlier in the season. I coudn't believe how many queen bees we were seeing, working their way along the moss and poking their noses into it. The only explanation for this was that they were Cuckoo bees looking for nests to infiltrate, as all regular queens will have nested by now.
Sure enough, we checked a few of them out and they were cuckoo bees (Bufftail and Redtail). We saw a few workers too (bufftail & carder) mooching about near the moss and hoped to be led to a nest somewhere, but it was not to be; most of them shot off without us being able to follow them.
The other striking thing was how massive the queens looked! The cuckoo bees seems to be a bit longer than average anyway, but of course we are now used to looking at our small workers and tiny wee Holly, so that has distorted our perception. Can't believe only a few weeks ago we were trying to catch these huge beasts!
As we wandered along the embankment we suddenly spotted this:
We did a bit of research afterwards and concluded it was two bees fighting each other (not mating). At least of them (the one resting at the end of the video) is a cuckoo bee (vestal cuckoo) - an imitation of a Bufftail bumble bee. We are not 100% sure about the smaller one - whether it is a queen or a worker; but they are definitely fighting. We can't know whether the cuckoo was prevented from entering a nest or forcibly ejected.
From what we can tell it's fairly uncommon for them to fight outside of the nest (or at least be seen doing so ). Fights are reported to happen over the nest site itself between regular queens, who will in fact fight to the death; presumably this happens in the nest site itself when one tries to take over.
It's not unreasonable to think something similar would happen with cuckoo bees. Although they themselves are reported to cohabit with a host queen (as well as in some cases attempt to kill the host), they are also potentially subject to attack and fight to the death.
I spent some time last night trying to capture some macro shots of Holly in amongst the moss to demonstrate how good her camouflage is. When I looked at her this morning I'm sure her stripy bands were more dull! BCW agreed and had observed the same thing independently.
This is not the first time we have felt the vibrancy of her markings has changed - previously we had been attributing it to a poor state of health and possibly low nutrition. However, the fact it appears to have changed overnight while she is, basically, in a well-fed state sheds a new light on things and generates a whole series of thoughts:
Do the bands naturally vary in colour over time?
Is there a periodicity to this (e.g. daily)
Is it driven by other factors, such as levels of light, state of nutrition/health etc.?
As far as I'm concerned, these are intriguing questions; and given there seems to be little research done about the camouflage aspects of bee bandings, I suspect they are unanswered. I may be able to devise some experiments and measures to try and answer some of these questions.
Here are a few videos introducing our "high dependency" bee, Holly. As you can tell she is very small and disabled with a missing leg and wing. However, this has not stopped her being as active as possible and we have now transferred her to a bigger box with better food supply and bedding. We can tell when she has more energy - she darts around the box more and her colours look brighter. You really can see the difference when she is "off colour".
Her colours, in fact, have inspired some thoughts about camouflage, and I'll be setting up a separate page to document that in due course.
This is a picture of the new box we have created for her
I have made some fake flowers (the 3 green blobs) for her that we now call "flower mountain" (sounds like something out of Disney). (We've also got a "flower tower" now too, not shown on the picture).
For the last few days I have been looking at the overnight DVR footage each morning to see if there are any interesting. Here's a few things we have noticed:
1. Starting the day
The first bumblebees start to emerge from the nest around the time the sun starts to shine directly on it. We can tell this because when the sun shines directly into the nest (it faces East) it triggers the internal camera to switch off the infra-red and we can see this happen on our video recordings. It's around this time we then start seeing the first bees heading off to fields. It's also easy to see them exit the nest as when they enter the entrance tube, they block the sunlight momentarily and the camera switches back to infra-red. This appears as a kind of "flashing" effect on the video and gives us a second or two notice that a bee is about to emerge!
This actually ties in with behaviour we saw with our queens when they used to emerge from the front nestbox at around 10am. Although this box faced North, it was around this time that the sun would shine off our window and bounce directly onto the nestbox entrance. This currently suggests to us that the bees' outdoor exploratory behaviour is triggered by the levels of sunlight entering the nest. It probably stands to reason, but the beauty of observing in the 'wild' rather than in a lab is we can see this correlation more directly.
2. The first trip of the day is the "paper run"
At the time of writing (mid May) our bees are first emerging from the colony at around 7am in the morning. As it happens, over an hour before that, we saw a Common Carder bee on the lavender right next to our nest. We don't know if being an ealier riser is symptomatic of their type, or just down to the location of their nest, light levels and so on.
Assuming, however, that we don't have any bees staying out overnight from the nest (a possiblity if they get caught out in bad weather), then we can pretty much time how long these early bees spend out when they first leave. This morning we were able to count about 4 out and 4 back in between about 7.30 and 8am.
On average they were spending about 15 minutes away from the nest. They are not coming back laden with pollen at this time, perhaps just partaking of a light organic breakfast!
3. Young are hatching in increasing numbers
We cannot see the hatching area inside the nestbox. The main reason is the camera is not pointing at it! - but that's because we were unable to find it. The true layout of the box will not be revealed till the end of the season when we can deconstruct it - but it seems that most of the action is happening below a rather sturdy (possibly supported) layer of nesting material which we cannot get access to.
However, we know that young are hatching because we are seeing them leave the nest. And we know it's the young leaving the nest because they perform a special "memorisation" and "landmarking" routine when they leave the nest for the first time.
This is quite a fascinating and recognisable routine, so I've put some videos together below - the first one shows their behaviour close the entrance as they memorise it. The second one (about 30 seconds in) shows the wider circling behaviour as they map out the landmarks in the nearby area:
Between 7am and Midday we counted about half-a-dozen new bees today - a record so far.
We also observed one or two bees actually performing this type of behaviour on the way IN to the nest (you can see one at the end of this video). This has us slightly baffled - at the moment our best hypothesis is that perhaps these are bees on the first time back to the nest and they are re-affirming their memory of the nest, double-checking they are not heading into the wrong territory. Pure speculation on our part.
There's not much time to sleep
We can use the motion detection feature on the DVR to monitor how much activity occurs in the nestbox during the night. We were very interested to see if the bees ever really went to sleep or carried on being busy throughout the night. What we've observed is that there is less activity during the wee small hours of the night but they never really stop completely. The quietest time is between 2am and 3am - during that time, for example, there might be one or two bees during the whole hour that come into view of the camera. Outside of those hours the rate is higher.
At some point I'm hoping to count these up and produce some firmer stats (unfortunately this is a bit of a manual task). The intention is also to correlate the daytime activity with weather data also.
It should be borne in mind that our camera is not in the heart of the nest, but pointed over (we think) the sugar-water wick used for drinking/feeding. So, the night-time activity we see is likely to represent feeding behaviour rather than whatever-it-is might be happening deep inside the nest. One of the behaviours we also see at this position appears to be night-time perimeter patrol. These are bees that traverse the edge of the box, sometimes nudging others out of the way, but don't stop to feed or tug on the nest material.
The idea of a security patrol is not entirely ludicrous. We have already observed on several occasions, after disrupting the nest, a lone bee coming to inspect the damage and survey the scene. Mpst revcently, when we inserted the camera into the nestbox and re-opened the hive entrance, a bee came into that entrance and sat there as if on "lookout". It didn't come out onto the box to inspect it, but just sat in the entrance, blocking it and watching us. It was a bit uncanny really!
Anthropomorphism
Of course, we don't have full scientific explanations for all the activities we see, so it's easy to anthropomorphise the bee behaviours with Human explanations. On the other hand, bees are social animals, so it makes some sense that there could be roles that aid the stability of the colony.
