Small Trackers Map Bee Behavior

If you already have issues keeping track of where your children are, then you might want to take note that you are not exactly a detail oriented person. Which means you should probably not work with the likes of small insects, bees included. Keeping track of a flying insect is tough enough, but here is a tool that might help those in the field out – a new small tracker that has been specially designed to monitor bee behavior. This tracker is being tested by ecologists at Kew Gardens in London.

Working on the tracker is not too difficult, as it uses off-the-shelf technology and is based on equipment that is used to track pallets in warehouses. Creator Mark O’Neill claimed that the readers that will pick up a signal from the kit will remain connected to Raspberry Pi computers, and these computers in turn log the readings.

Such a device boasts of a reach of up to 2.5m (8.2ft), which is a vast improvement when you take into consideration how previous models were restricted to a mere 1cm (0.4in), how about that for progress? The tracker itself is composed of a standard RFID (radio frequency identification) chip as well as a custom designed aerial.

Edwin Kee
Categories: Gadgets
Tags: Science