> Are you seeing bees coming in during early 
> Spring and the temperature drops quickly

Can't be temperature, bees are much better aircraft than that.

Hard for the ambient temperature to fall quickly enough to stop flying bees
from making it the last few feet to the entrance.  When one takes bees and
puts them in the freezer briefly to immobilize them for marking, the
standard time and temp for what is claimed to be "harmless immobilization"
is 3 mins at -20 C (-4 F).  That gives you maybe 5 mins total to mark the
bees before they warm up and become active again.

If we accept a minimum ambient flight temperature of +10 C (+50 F), this
means that we have to somehow chill flight muscles that are already warmed
up after the bee has flown some distance, and somehow get from somewhere
around 50 F to somewhere around -4 F during the time that a bee is flying
home.

We don't have to completely immobilize the bee, just chill it enough to stop
flight, and making walking difficult.  So, let's divide the number in half
and call it a 25-degree F temperature drop from the time the bee takes off
until the bee reaches the beeyard.  Bees fly at about 7 m/s (15mph), and
let's cut that in half for a Monty Python-esque "fully-laden" bee.   So 7
mph, and the bee is pretty likely to be less than 7 miles away when
foraging, so an 1-hour flight one-way would certainly be a completely
over-the-top worst case scenario.

So, a 20 to 50 degree F temperature drop in less than an hour?  I don't
think that this would be a common occurrence anywhere below 5,000 up Mt
Washington at sunset in late August.  (As an aside, smart hikers do not find
themselves still on any mountain trail at sunset, having planned for twice
as slow a descent as their ascent, and turned back as time dictated.)

Epiphany tomorrow - time to bake the Galette des Rois!  Goes great with
sparkling mead.  Another overlooked honey-marketing holiday, as you can't
literally just "let them eat cake!  


	

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