INVESTIGATION OF THE PURPOSE OF THE HONEYBEE QUEEN TOOTING AND QUACKING

Overview

In 2020 we carefully recorded the tooting and the quacking vibrations spontaneously emanating from honeybee virgin queens during the swarming season (see References).

The measurements was done on a collection of honeybee hives, some that were inspected, some that were not. We observed that for hives that are not disturbed, the tooting signal ceases upon any swarm (secondary or tertiary), and that it resumes a few hours later.

This led us to suggesting that the tooting signal of mobile queens is perhaps a signal stimulating the worker bees of the colony to keep quacking queens captive, and that the absence of tooting triggers the same bees to release one quacking queen of their choice, which results in said queen bee to start tooting. This would appear to allow colonies to achieve an orderly release of virgin queens, one at a time.

We have developed hardware that allows us to drive vibrational signals into a honeybee colony. The hardware also allows us to check that the signals that we are driving are of specific magnitude and frequency, so we can accurately reproduce, artificially, with high fidelity, signals that would originate from the bees themselves.

We are therefore in a position allowing us to artificially drive pre-recorded queen tooting signals that will reach the honeybees in a way accurately similar to the tooting signals that would originate from a real virgin queen residing on the honeycomb.

Your work will involve working with honeybees, computers, and measurement devices which you will assemble and test. You will work with several honeybee hives, and will wait to detect a primary swarm taking place naturally. You will then artificially drive realistic queen tooting recordings into the colony, and see whether you can delay the occurrence of a real queen tooting detected in the colony, and for how long. You will write simple programs to run and analyse the measurements. Your  work will provide scientific breakthroughs in the fundamental understanding of this particular phenomenon. In doing so, numerous applications will be made available to beekeepers and scientists.

References

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-66115-5