>>What direction does a swarm of bees, in an empty box, build the comb? North,
>>East, West, or South?

   Stan Sandler responded to that message and cited the following paper:

>Orientation of Comb Building by Honeybees;  David DeJong;  Journal of
>Comparative Physiology;  1982;  147:  495-501

   Artificial magnetic fields (stronger than the Earth's magnetic field)
may influence the direction in which combs are built.  One can find a
summary of some earlier such work in BEE WORLD (1974, April issue).

   Stan added:

>The references in that paper refer to several papers on the optimum
>arrangement of combs relative to the entrance direction and says there is
>not agreement, but that at least two papers, one studying skeps, and one
>studying tree nests show no preferred direction relative to the nest
>entrance or to magnetic north.

   Stan appears to be correct in pointing out that no preferred direction
seems to exist in Nature.

   For example, in our locating of feral colonies on Santa Cruz Island, we
found combs with various orientations with respect to compass direction.
During a conference a year ago April in Tucson, Jerry Loper showed many
slides of feral colony combs in Arizona; again, combs faced in various
directions, even within single colonies.

   Paul Cronshaw, of Santa Barbara, removed 14 colonies from a two story
wood shake-sided building and found combs aligned in various directions in
the four walls.  In one case, a colony had built combs in the space between
the floor and the ceiling of the room below.  During the several years of
its construction, that massive comb ended up with all sorts of alignment.
The earliest combs had a southeast-northwest orientation.  Later combs were
nearly due east and west.  Yet later combs were WSW-ENE, and the last combs
were straight east and west.

   We humans tend to orient our structures (and often place our hives) in
north-south alignment.  Our behavior could thus influence the directions in
which combs are built in hives.

                                                                Adrian

Adrian M. Wenner                    (805) 963-8508 (home phone)
967 Garcia Road                     (805) 893-8062  (UCSB FAX)
Santa Barbara, CA  93106  [http://www.beesource.com/pov/wenner/index.htm]

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*
*    "The history of science teaches us that each time we think
*  that we have it all figured out, nature has a radical surprise
*  in store for us that requires significant and sometimes drastic
*  changes in how we think the world works."
*
*                                          Brian Greene (1999:373)
*
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