🐝 Buzz me in! 🐝 Several hundred bees in Pennsylvania and New York are sporting QR codes on their backs to track when they go in and out of their hives to better understand how long honey bees spend foraging for food. The work, a collaboration among entomologists and electrical engineers at Penn State, is the first step in solving a long-standing mystery of how far bees travel to collect pollen and nectar. So far, the researchers have learned that while most trips outside of the hive last mere minutes, a small minority of bees can spend more than two hours away. “We also found that bees are foraging for a lot longer over their lifetimes than initially thought,” said Robyn Underwood, Penn State Extension educator in apiculture and co-author on the paper, explaining that honey bees are believed to live for about 28 days. “We’re seeing bees foraging for six weeks, and they don’t start foraging until they are already about two weeks old, so they live a lot longer than we thought.” ...