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Date: | Sat, 21 Nov 2020 18:34:40 -0500 |
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> A thing to be borne in mind, besides the availability of
> hollow trees is their location. If a hollow tree is next
> to another one, already occupied, will bees occupy it
> or will they prefer to find one half a mile away?
In Virginia, I kept swarm traps within a few hundred yards of each of my beeyards without many successful captures.
Many of us have seen swarms set up shop and draw combs out under an existing hive's bottom board, so the assumption here is that the swarm issued from the same yard.
When I moved to NYC, and found that some beekeepers were far less "hands on" than they should have been, I put swarm traps on rooftops near the hives of the more negligent beekeepers I knew of, and the attractiveness of a 42-liter capacity triple-thickness waxed cardboard Cisco Router shipping carton with a to-be-refurbed brood frame (the intersection of entomology and technology!) proved very attractive. This was a distance of sometimes only a few hundred feet in some cases. But I could not verify the source of the swarms, of course, so this is a "good guess", not a verified certainty.
In "Honeybee Democracy" Tom Seeley, in Ch 4, tells of scouts for a swarm dancing about sites ranging from 200 meters away to 4,800 meters away, which means that these very-carefully tracked scouts explored a roughly 30-square mile (70 sq km) area in searching for a new home.
I'm not sure one can generalize about distances, the specifics seem to rule the day.
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