At 09:58 AM 7/13/98 -0600, you wrote:
>At 05:03 PM 7/11/1998 -0700, Andy wrote:
 
>And no, I don't have the answers.  At this point, I simply know that saying
>that the bees rush home due to changes in barometric pressure is an overly
>simplistic assumption that doesn't hold up when you can see the actual
>responses of bees correlated with weather.
 
Hay Guys, Gals, and bee keepers too,
 
The point is I never said that the bees rush home or do I know of any
beekeeper who has ever said to me or that I even overheard anyone saying
the "bees rush home because of any barometric change". I have seen bees do
many things but never seen them rush home because of any barometric change.
If that was true the coast would be unfit for bees as almost every day
there are differences between AM and PM barometric reading. What I am
saying is that beekeepers including myself who have a great deal of hands
on experience working their bees report that in their experience they can
tell the beautiful day we are enjoying one day is going to change the next
because of the aggressive behavior of their bees. This is a "fact" it may
not be the same everyplace, of that I am sure, but its unfair and not
scientific to flatly say this is wrong because anyone else has observed
something different.
 
I have no argument that what Jerry is doing, in fact I think it is the
greatest, and doing it in as many places and with as much technical
equipment may make it the fact for the place, time, and conditions it was
done but it is wrong to say that I or any beekeeper who reports what we
have observed is not the way we observed it, without walking in our shoes,
which many may have a lot of catching up if they want to do that as many of
these coastal bee location are being black toped and roofed over.
 
>Our weather station doesn't include light intensity.  The Alpha system
>covers this information plus hive temperatures, weight changes, RH, etc.
>One of these days, we will add an Alpha system to our observation hive.
 
>And yes Andy, we do have electronic hives at different elevations and in
>different parts of the country.  We don't post all of this to the web - we
>doubt that most beekeepers want to look at hundreds of Mb of data per day.
 
>We can make this information available to those who want to work with it.
 
There is nothing wrong with any of this and I support your good work and
you for sure you are developing and should have some interesting and useful
data that may take years of careful study to understand....But I wonder if
then we will know anything different other then what I know from the use of
my rear end and noise. It won't change anything, a day before a weather
change on the coast of central California beekeepers will know because they
are experiencing a behavioral change in their bees.
 
I suspect that beekeepers who are young now will someday be old and they
also will be using their own rear ends and noises to do the same thing.
 
In any case I surrender, you are right, what I observed was only an
aberration and I misunderstood it. Oh, BTW my queen nucs are really
aggressive today and.......will be tomorrow as they don't have laying
queens, and I can prove it to anybody that wants a few stings. But then its
100+ degrees in the shade and the ants are bothering them and they are all
hanging out on the front of their nuc boxes so my proof is a little weak.<G>
 
Anyway want to talk about how bees react during earthquakes as I also have
first hand observations on that having kept bees at one time on a very
active fault...that was active enough to find the beehives not in the same
neat lines a week or two after unloading them because of the almost daily
ground movement.
 
ttul, the OLd Drone
 
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