A postage-stamp-sized kit with a chip Intel developed for wearable technology will be used in a high-tech assault on global bee colony collapse.
The Sunnyvale chip giant said Monday that a kit powered by the company s Edison chip will be distributed world-wide by Australia s national science agency to research partners studying bee colony collapse.
An Intel Edison Breakout Board kit will be placed inside beehives to monitor bee activity collected from tiny sensors attached to bees, according to the Sunnyvale chip giant.
The sensors download activity data when the bees return to their hives.
Bee colonies are collapsing around the world and we don t know why, said Paulo de Souza, an official with the Australian national science agency CSIRO. Due to the urgent and global nature of this issue, we saw the need to develop a methodology that any scientist could easily deploy, he said in an announcement of the collaboration with Intel.
The Edison chip uses little power and is customizable so that scientists can add sensors to collect a range of data.
The kit will send data to CSIRO s Data Access Portal, where researchers will be able to build 3D models to visualize how bees are moving around, Intel said. That should help pinpoint threats to the creatures, which are responsible for pollinating about a third of the world s food crops.
The technology was originally used in Hobard, Tasmania, where more than 10,000 bees are flying around with sensors on their backs.
Photo: Len Lahman (Mercury News)