Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

Elphya t1_iu7rpwp wrote

Reply to comment by JanItorMD in Researchers have, for the first time, used CT scan to peer inside swarms of honeybees and found that the bees don’t clump together in a random group. Instead, they seem to form dome-shaped structures following surprisingly sophisticated mathematical rules, or what researchers call a “scaling law” by giuliomagnifico

"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.

First, 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. Then, the team rotated those swarms in front of a small CT machine originally developed for veterinary hospitals."

3