Electrostatic communication among bees provides information about the health of ecosystems

Bees are pollinators that play a central role in many ecosystems. The social signals exchanged by these insects therefore provide essential information about environmental conditions. To better decipher these signals, researchers have developed an automated system capable of monitoring colony health over the long term by measuring electrostatic fields, without relying on overly sophisticated technology.   Honeybees are sentinels of ecosystem health. These indispensable pollinators, which are beneficial to both flowers and fruit trees, share ecological niches with many other pollinators. Their pollination efficiency—and consequently the global health of the colonies—can be influenced by numerous environmental factors such as seasons, weather conditions, beekeeping activities, parasitic infections (viruses, bacteria, fungi, mites), and exposure to insecticides. By extension, the health of a bee colony can therefore reflect the conditions of an entire ecosystem. Communication among bees provides insight into the colony’s health status. In fact, a bee colony is an organized unit with a hierarchical social structure and highly interactive groups of individuals who divide up different tasks, and whose stereotypic behaviour depends on age and experience. The social signals that bees exchange through sophisticated body movements are therefore important indicators of the hive’s proper functioning and health. Bee dances—a coded and abstract language laden with specific meanings—are particularly rich in information. Bees can shiver to regulate their body temperature, act as fans to control humidity and CO₂ levels in the hive, or wiggle to prepare young bees for flight or swarming. Bee dances are also used to indicate the location of food sources, a suitable site for the bee colony to settle, water sources, or areas for collecting resin. This geolocation is not always easy for humans to decipher. However, the bees’ rhythmic movements are technically easy to observe since they produce characteristic oscillations. Electrostatic signals are emitted through the movements and vibrations the bees make during their dances. In fact, the surface of their bodies is covered with wax that becomes electrostatically charged through friction between different body parts, between insects inside the crowded hive, or between the air and their bodies during flight. Thus, a large part of the bees’ social communication can be measured through electric fields. Researchers therefore sought to use these electrostatic field signals to characterize and quantify the flow of information within the hive, such as pollination activity and its dynamics over time and space. They developed an automated system that records and quantifies social signals under normal beekeeping conditions based on fluctuations in electrical charges. These signals, combined with physical measurements inside and outside the colony (temperature, humidity, hive weight, and activity at the hive entrance), aim to identify biologically significant states—whether normal or abnormal—of the entire colony. These electrostatic field measurements closely reflect biologically relevant conditions and, in particular, enable long-term monitoring of the bees’ health. By extension, these measurements in honeybee colonies will also provide biologically and ecologically relevant data on the health of ecosystems. Thanks to this bee monitoring tool, beekeepers will be able to monitor their bee colonies without relying on cutting-edge technology or overly sophisticated equipment that is unsuitable for beekeeping. In particular, the researchers explain how to configure the recording device, how to install it in a hive, and how to interpret the data to identify biologically significant states of the colony.