I am a female hobbyist beekeeper (10 years.)  I have two sisters.  One is also a beekeeper (4 years) and the other is my sometime beekeeper helper.  We are all color blind.  I knew we all had red green  color blindness, but we all took the test today on the link provided, and we are all totally color blind.  My father was color blind and my nephew is color blind.  I also have a hard time finding candy cap mushrooms in the forest because of their reddish color.  

Thanks for your interesting link.

Tina Keller   


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Date:    Thu, 11 Jul 2013 20:17:30 +0000
From:    Christina Wahl <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Color blindness in beekeepers

The question came up:  How many beekeepers are colorblind?

The most common form of colorblindness is red-green (inability to distinguish between red and green) and since it is a sex-linked deficiency, mostly men have it.  In the twenty years I've been teaching biology, I only found one woman with a very mild version of red-green color blindness (we were very excited about it, she was less so...but said it explained why she had trouble matching clothes).

Around 10% of men in the general population are colorblind.  Here's a good source with a table:

http://www.colour-blindness.com/general/prevalence/

So, even though beekeepers are an unusual subset of the human population (or we like to think so!), we can assume they are a random sample of the general population and therefore I'd say about 1 in 10 male beekeepers are colorblind, and no women beekeepers are colorblind.

Christina

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