Science hasn’t been giving us a tremendous amount of good news these days. We’re speeding toward climate catastrophe, for one. We’ve screwed up the environment so badly, it’s hard to even call it an environment anymore. And that’s coming back to bite (or sting) us: Bee populations, which we rely on to pollinate our crops, are plummeting.

But science is also coming to the rescue, by gluing QR codes to bumblebees’ backs and tracking their movements with a robotic camera. Researchers have created a system that tracks individual bees as well as the dynamics of whole colonies exposed to imidacloprid, a neurotoxin that belongs to the infamous neonicotinoid group of pesticides. The findings aren’t pretty, but they may go a long way in teasing apart how neonicotinoids are ravaging bees, and how we might save these fliers.

Neonicotinoids are the most common class of insecticides globally. “When we first started using them in agriculture in particular, they passed the initial tests of, Oh are they safe for bees at the concentrations they're likely to encounter in the field?” says Harvard biologist James Crall, lead author on a new paper in Science describing the bumblebee-tracking technique.

But those tests weren’t exactly thorough enough. “You might not see a dead bee in 24 or 48 hours, but still you're seeing important behavioral shifts over time that lead to impaired colony function and growth in the long run,” Crall adds.

James Crall

Even if a neonicotinoid like imidacloprid, a common insecticide, doesn’t outright kill a bee, it can cause other changes to it. Previous research shows, for instance, that in the field neonicotinoids can impair a bee’s ability to navigate and find flowers. That has implications for how bees forage to feed themselves and their colonies at large. What’s been going on inside a colony exposed to neonicotinoids, though, has been harder to parse.