Data from: Evaluating the foraging performance of individual honey bees in different environments with automated field RFID systems

Measuring the individual foraging performances of pollinators is crucial to guide environmental policies that aim at enhancing pollinator health and pollination services. Automated systems have been developed to track the activity of individual honey bees, but their deployment is extremely challenging. This has limited the assessment of individual foraging performances in full-strength bee colonies in the field. Most studies available to date have been constrained to use downsized bee colonies located in urban and suburban areas. Environmental policy-making, on the other hand, needs a more comprehensive assessment of honey bee performances in a broader range of environments, including in remote agricultural and wild areas. Here we detail a new autonomous field method to record high quality data on the flight ontogeny and foraging performance of honey bees, using Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID). We separate bee traffic into returning and exiting tunnels to improve data quality, solving many previous limitations of RFID systems caused by traffic jams and the parasitic coupling of RFID antennae. With this method, we assembled a large RFID dataset made of control bee colonies from experiments conducted in different locations and seasons. We hope our results will be a starting point to understand how ontogenetic and environmental factors affect the individual performances of honey bees, and that our method will enable the large-scale replication of individual pollinator performance studies.

精准测定传粉者的个体觅食表现，对于制定旨在提升传粉者健康水平与授粉服务能力的环境政策至关重要。目前已开发出可追踪单只蜜蜂活动的自动化系统，但此类系统的野外部署难度极高，这极大限制了对正常规模野外蜂群中个体觅食表现的评估工作。截至目前，绝大多数相关研究仅能依托城市与郊区的小型蜂群开展。而环境政策制定则需要在更广泛的环境范围内（包括偏远农业区与野生区域）对蜜蜂的各项表现进行更为全面的评估。本研究详细介绍了一种全新的野外自主监测方法：借助射频识别（Radio-Frequency Identification, RFID）技术，可高质量记录蜜蜂的飞行发育历程与觅食表现。我们将蜜蜂的进出动线分离为归巢通道与出巢通道，以此提升数据质量，解决了此前RFID系统因蜂群拥堵、射频天线寄生耦合所带来的诸多局限。依托该方法，我们构建了一个大型RFID数据集，其数据源自不同地点、不同季节开展的对照组蜂群实验。我们期望本研究结果能够为解析个体发育与环境因素如何影响蜜蜂个体表现提供研究基础，并希望本方法能够推动传粉者个体表现研究的大规模复制与推广。