Honeybees are at risk, along with the crops they pollinate. These scientists think the solution lies in the insects’ brains

PHILADELPHIA — The honeybees looked perfectly healthy, buzzing about their boxy wooden hive on a warm autumn day in central Pennsylvania. Elizabeth Capaldi suspected otherwise. Clad in a protective white suit and hat, the biologist reached out with a gloved hand to capture one of the insects in a small vial, then took it back to her Bucknell University laboratory to dissect its brain. Her colleague David Rovnyak later placed a sample of the bee’s innards inside a large metal cylinder and pelted it with high-frequency radio waves — a type of scanning technology that revealed the amounts of cert...