Wasps and RFID

The Zoological Society of London has published a study in Current Biology on the nest drifting (individual insects moving between different nests) of social wasps. To track the wasps, the team fitted the insects with RFID tags and placed sensors at the entrance of each nest to record their movements, in real time, in and out of the nests. The idea came from the Oyster card "touch in, touch out" system used on the London Underground.

The researchers, working in the tropics of Panama, looked at an extended colony of 33 nests belonging to a species of paper wasp called Polistes canadensis. In each nest, they tagged every female worker, fitting a total of 422 with the RFID tags. The researchers found 56% of the population were drifting from nest to nest and found the wasps were helping to raise their relatives' young in other nests.