Equipped with a new , groundbreaking tool, biologists are trying to determine what’s causing the mass death of bees all over the world. Microchips attached to the backs of French bees may enable scientists to monitor the lives of individual insects and discover what’s killing them.

  Though the idea of using a pair of tweezers to equip a number of bees with tiny microchips may sound like science fiction, biologists at the French Laboratoire Biologie et Protection de l’abeille are taking their work very seriously. Billions of bees from all over the world have disappeared in the last decade, and scientists want to know why.

  France has a long tradition of both beekeeping and research in bees and honey, and consequently, French scientists have long led the way in trying to find explanations for the worldwide decline in bee populations. Primary work with the bees is carried out around the city of Avignon in southern France, where several research institutions are dedicated entirely to bee research. There, scientists have developed a groundbreaking method that makes it possible to track a large number of individual bees and expose them to different influencing factors, observing how each affects their behavior.

  Each bee is outfitted with a microchip and moved to customized beehives with scanners at the entrances, which register when the bees leave the hive, how long they’re gone and when they come back.

  “It is a major breakthrough,” says Cédric Alaux of the Laboratoire Biologie et Protection de l’abeille. “For the moment, we are studying the interaction among different stress factors. But we cannot rule out that there is one single factor behind it all that influences the bees in a negative way.”

  Pests and disease are among the obvious culprits, but there could also be more indefinable factors, such as electromagnetic radiation from mobile phones, which may interfere with the bees’ ability to navigate, or the steady reduction in plant diversity. Studies have indicated that bees that eat the nectar of many different kinds of plants have a more active immune system and tolerate stress better than bees that only eat nectar from a few plant species. In order to distinguish one factor from another and assess the effect of each, scientists needed to follow a large number of individuals.

  “We tried to develop an automatic tracking and identification system to use on a single individual,” says Axel Decourtye of the agriculture-focused University of Avignon. “And now we can track an unlimited number of insects without problems and follow their life stories.”

  The method also allows scientists to influence the individual bees in different ways to see what happens when they are exposed to pesticides. Decourtye says that, the study has, for the first time, confirmed a suspicion that even small doses of pesticide spray make it harder for the bees to find their way back to the hives. Ongoing experiments are examining whether the pesticides are the main culprit or whether other factors also play a significant role.