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<UK marked large numbers of bees in their home apiary...found them all
over the district -
certainly up to one and a half miles away as I recall.>
We've had our trained bees readily search for as far as two miles, flying
across residential areas. After that, the numbers began to fall off.
That said, I tend to agree that in a forested area, bees may tend to stay
closer to home, as per Tom Seeley's work.
In our open prairie areas, fields more than a mile from an apiary will have
plenty of bees. We found they could cover two miles in less than 4
minutes.
DRIFT is only partially true in terms of what the books say. Our bee
counters in Maryland (50 hives), five apiaries, demonstrated that conventional
ideas of drift are only crudely corrrect.
I do agree with Tom's work indicating different densities of bees with
distance. We see that in work with our conditioned (trained) bees. All other
things being equal, any bee has the option of foraging out over a 360
degree radius from the hive. The farther from the hive, the less likely you
will find a bee in any unit of space (e.g., square yard or meter).
However, we all know bees don't forage randomly. The field(s) in bloom,
ease of flight, wind strength and direction, all factor in.
This discussion about apiary effect is good in that it brings out a
concept that unfortunately many bee researchers forget, something called
psuedo-replication.
Jerry
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