"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."