Sleep deprivation makes people talk nonsense—which led animal behaviorist Barrett Klein to wonder if worn-out honeybees might also have trouble communicating with the waggle dances they use to share directions to food and hives. To test his idea, he had to figure out a way to keep bees in the Cranberry Lake Biological Station awake. The solution was a sleepy bee's worst waking nightmare: the insominator.
Klein and his research partner glued tiny bits of steel to some of the bees and attached a sliding panel of magnets over the glass wall of their hive; a control group got nonmagnetic copper tags. Then they started jostling—sweeping the magnets back and forth three times a minute, all night long. Sure enough, the steel-chipped, joggled bees had wackier waggles. That could mean hives that are trucked around the country to crops are in a constant state of sleep deprivation, disrupting their pollination activities.
For future experiments, Klein has a new motorized insominator, which he can program to shake at various intervals. The bees still toss and turn, but at least the researchers can get some sleep.
