I've flown bees in small tents (10x10x100 ft) and large (1/2 acre, 40 ft tall).


Forager honey bees that have flown free never really adapt to a tent.  They will follow the sun until they get trapped in a corner.  Near dusk, some of these will find their way home, but most will die, trapped in the corner or end nearest the setting sun.


Open tent fabric is not as bad as glass or plexiglas in terms of trapping honey bees.  There are special fabric designed for pollinator tents, and the extra cost is warranted.


Bumble bees are far better for greenhouses and tents then honey bees.  There are 100 acre greenhouse farms in the SW of the USA, mainly owned by the Dutch, that use bumblebees for indoor pollination.  Bumblebees are far less likely to beat themselves to death against the glass.




If one has to use honey bees, there are some steps to reduce wastage of bees trapped in corners.


1) Use a nucleus colony - full-sized colonies are usually far too many bees (except in the monster tent we had for use from DARPA, and even that tent killed some bees, but not a lot of them)
.
2) Foraging activity inside the tent will be approximately 1/2 that of a similar sized colony outside the tent - apparently the reduction in light inside a tent reduces flight activity (we have weeks of data from a DARPA trial where colonies inside the monster tent were compared to colonies outside the tent using highly accurate, bi-directional bee counters on every hive).  It's a factor not recognized by most people conducting semi-field tests for pesticide registration - the environment inside an enclosure is not the same as that outside, and the bees change their behavior and flight activity accordingly.


3) If the tent has fold-up sides and ends, open them and place the colony near, but outside the tent.  Lost, confused bees will have a better chance of finding and returning to the hive. 


4) I've also placed a hive outside of the tent, with the normal entrance facing away from the tent and the 'pollination' entrance plumbed via a pipe to the inside of the tent.   Add a slide to shut off each of the entrances. Provide some small holes in the corners where most of the bees get trapped.  Let the bees forage both directions from the hive-  both free flight outside and restricted flight inside the tent.  If too many bees favor the external entrance, close it off for the main part of the day, but be sure the outside entrance is open before dusk.  Most of the trapped bees will find the exscape holes in the corners, fly out, loop around, and go back into their hive through their normal (outer) entrance.   On the first day that the bees are in the tent, plan on being back near end of day as the sun is setting - have your scissors, glass cutter, etc. ready.  The bees will tell you where to cut the escape holes.  That will be where hundreds, possibly thousands of bees are grouped, banging against the barrier.


4) Regardless of how you manage honey bees in tents, the best approach requires doing something no beekeeper would normally do - you need to lose the experienced forager field force.


From an apiary at least 3 miles (or as far from the tent as possible), pick the hive(s) that you intend to use for the tent.  It's best to pick hives close to another hive - say on the same side of a pallet.  On the day that you want to move the hive(s) to the tent, go to your source apiary in the morning.  Wait until the foragers are freely flying, and then pick up and move the selected hive(s) - it doesn't have to go any great distance, but it does need to be moved away from its normal position.  Move the selected hive(s) for tent pollination to the far side of the apiary from their normal home position.  The returning foragers, not finding home where they expect it to be, will mostly move the into the nearest neighboring colony.   


You may have to move the 'tent' hive(s) a couple of times during the day- your objective is to strip out most of the experienced foragers without decimating the colony population.  When you've 'lost' the majority of the forager force (and still have a decent sized bee population in the tent pollinator hive(s) then move it or them into the tent.  Ideally, you should plan on moving the hive(s) into the tent(s) a day or two just before or as the bloom is starting.  It usually takes a couple of days for the new forager force to get it's act together.


Because of the loss of the main, experienced, forager cohort, the colony will shift duties, sending out new, young, forager recruits.  These foragers for the most part have not flown free, so they will be more likely to encounter the fabric, glass, plastic barrier and after a few bumps just turn away from it.  This method is not perfect, but it will dramatically reduce forager wastage -  a far smaller percent of the foragers will get trapped in the corners..   Their normal home and foraging range is in the tent, it's the where the hive was at when they first flew.  These bees aren't used to a world without barriers.  They are in a learning phase, and they will learn that there are barriers - it's the norm for them.


I picked up the lose the foragers trick from U.K. beekeepers who use honey bees to pollinate strawberries in greenhouses.  The escape holes and inside/outside plumbing from a colleague and friend down under.  The rest was based on many years of research with hives in a large array of tents.  Did I say - I hate tents.  For any experiment, you can only compare the results from tent to tent.  Extrapolation to the real, free-flying world is more or less a specious exercise.  And if doing pesticide trials - or industrial pollution (heavy metal) trials, where I started, you quickly learn, the number one cause of death and colony stress is the tent itself.














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