Researchers use big-brother tech to spy on bumblebees

By tagging individual bumblebees with microchips, biologists have gained insights into the daily life of a colony of bumblebees (Bombus impatiens) in unprecedented detail. The team found that while most bees are generalists collecting both pollen and nectar over the course of their lifetime, individual workers tend to specialize on one of the two during any given day, dedicating more than 90 percent of their foraging sorties to either pollen or nectar. The observations also revealed that individual bumblebee workers differ vastly in terms of their foraging activity.