Robots are talking with bees. A robotic bee can tell real bees the best places to forage, and at least some of the time they seem to get the message.
Bees communicate using a sequence of movements known as the waggle dance, where the dancer wiggles their body whilst moving in a figure of eight. The orientation and the length of the movements tell other bees the direction and distance of a food source. A robot called RoboBee can mimic this dance.
RoboBee doesn鈥檛 actually look much like a bee: it鈥檚 made of a cylindrical piece of sponge with plastic wings, and it鈥檚 attached to the end of a rod that controls its movements. But RoboBee鈥檚 looks aren鈥檛 that important, as inside a hive it鈥檚 so dark that bees don鈥檛 use sight to observe each other. Instead they smell and touch their nestmates with their antennae and detect air flow and vibrations through the honeycomb.
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The researchers filmed how bees responded to the RoboBee鈥檚 dance inside a hive. They hoped to see them follow the robot by staying close to it, touching it and tracking its movements as they do when other bees do the waggle dance.
Look at me, I鈥檓 waggling
On some days, the robot worked beautifully and on others the bees ignored it, says Tim Landgraf, who developed RoboBee with colleagues at the Free University of Berlin in Germany. They don鈥檛 yet know why the robot works sometimes but not others, he says. 听When bees did follow the dance, they did so for longer than the average amount of time they follow natural dances.
Landgraf estimates that the robot鈥檚 communication is 10 times less effective than that of real bees. This might be because it doesn鈥檛 have legs, so it doesn鈥檛 vibrate the honeycomb like a real bee. Chemical signals could be important too.
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Some of the bees were marked before the experiment. After each dance, an observer recorded the IDs of marked bees that appeared to pay attention to the robot. If one of these bees left the hive, another experimenter caught the bee and attached a transponder, allowing the bee to be tracked by radar.
This technique would give the absolute proof of the robot communicating effectively, but proved to be a little tricky in practice. Only four bees were successfully tracked by radar after observing a dance. Three of them appeared to follow the robot鈥檚 instructions, at least partially; the other ignored or misunderstood the directions. Overall, it was just too difficult to keep an eye on all of the marked bees and catch them once they got out of the hive.听The team hope to improve the听tracking process so that in the future they can monitor all of the bees in a colony simultaneously.
鈥淭his is still an exciting exploration, even if the results are still somewhat thin,鈥� says Lars Chittka of Queen Mary, University of London. 鈥淎 full understanding of this form of communication would mean that one should be able to implement it in a robotic system, and the mixed results show just how far we still are from such a goal.鈥�
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