The images could give scientists a new tool for understanding how bees and other social insects create such shapeshifting "superorganisms." The effort was a success: The group's method is so precise you can pick out individual bees in the 3D scans. Then, the team rotated those swarms in front of a small CT machine originally developed for veterinary hospitals. Getting bees to sit still for their X-rays took some work, noted Olga Shishkov, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher in the Peleg Lab at BioFrontiers.įirst, the researchers relied on honeybee queens to coax thousands of worker bees to join into swarms in the lab-these structures, which often hang upside-down, look a bit like a wriggly Jell-O mold. "But bees somehow know how to arrange themselves in order to maintain their mechanical stability." "I'm trained in physics, and these laws aren't obvious to me," said Peleg, assistant professor in the BioFrontiers Institute and Department of Computer Science at CU Boulder. Instead, they seem to form dome-shaped structures following surprisingly sophisticated mathematical rules, or what researchers call a "scaling law." The results could one day help engineers design more resilient buildings, or even swarms of tiny robots that behave a lot like insects, said study senior author Orit Peleg.Īnd bees can achieve all this despite having brains the size of grains of sand. The scans provide a deeper look at these humble insects: Bees, the group discovered, don't clump together in a random group.
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