How the bees follow scouts

That involved dabbing paint on the tiny 8216;8216;Nasanov glands8217;8217; of 12,000 bees in three swarms. It was not easy. They put 40 bees at a time into Ziploc bags, which they put in a refrigerator until the bees chilled enough to put up with the paint job. And to test whether the paint itself might change their ability to navigate, they chilled 12,000 more and put a drop of paint on a different body part, leaving the Nasanov glands clear.

After warming the bees up, they filmed each swarm while the scouts shot off in the direction of the new homes. All swarms followed just fine, ruling out the smell theory, the team reports in the January issue of the journal Animal Behavior.

The results8212;along with photographic evidence that scouts repeatedly streak through a swarm en route to a new home8212;are consistent with the idea that bees simply keep an eye on their navigators. But proof will require further experiments, Seeley said. No word on whether the team is designing tiny blindfolds.

LAT-WP