VOA常速英语:在蜜蜂身上装传感器来研究气候变化

This tiny sensor mounted on a bumblebee is monitoring all kinds of important environmental data. This is the brainchild of a group of researchers at the University of Washington. What made us start the aim of this was our prior work on building insect-sized robots. This is an insect-sized robot.

It works but the on-board battery adds too much weight to make it a good flier. So the team decided to use a bee instead of a battery. If we could have a sensor that flies around, we could do things like monitor the temperature, humidity in different parts of a farm to better understand the, you know, the weather conditions there and maybe improve crop yields. It can also provide clues about what is causing bee colonies to collapse, and monitor the inevitable march of climate change. The other thing that we could do is use this as a platform for biology research itself to answer questions about, you know, what bees are doing, how their behavior is affected by say, pesticide and changing climates and things like that. Getting the information from the circuit boards was problematic, so the team put small receivers on the edges of the field that monitored the bee’s location. And we placed the bees around the field and we collected data and it can reach up to 80 meters and can localize it within two to three meters of arrow.
So that’s enough for the agriculture task that we want to target. The sensor is incredibly lightweight and doesn’t seem to change the bees flight patterns or behavior. So the team is considering adding some components. We’re trying to see next what other things we can put on it, for example, if we can put something like a camera or other sensors, things like that. Each bee backpack can only store about 30 kilobytes of data, but the team is working on upping those numbers.
Kevin Enochs VOA News.