But I remember seeing every hive up at the Dyce lab outfitted with those
multi-colored checkerboard placards near every entrance, especially those
for observation hives entrances.  What was up with them?  This was back at
the last EAS up there... 2002?  Time flies...

1) Not how I remember it at all, but I was only there every day for 7 years.

2) Placing a sign on the entrance is a completely separate issue from what I was talking about, which was the constantly changing array of supers. The entrance of the hive is not affected by supering. 

We had only a few basic symbols we painted on plywood squares which could be screwed onto the front of the first story of the hive. These were used when we were doing specific experiments where we were trying to minimize drifting.

The ones I remember were three solid vertical bars, a solid circle, I don't think we had any checkerboard patterns. We varied the colors of the bars and circles. The main colors bees distinguish are yellow, blue, green, white. I always added red (even though they see it as black) because I like red.

Using bars or circles and several colors you can get quite a few different signs, probably enough. Drifting is less of a problem than people make it out to be anyway. It's just noise. There's always noise in any data set.

PLB

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