Jerry J.Bromenshenk you are quite right!  (Jan.31st posting) We need both so
I have altered the heading of this memo from 'versus' to 'and'.

For the simple beekeeper who wants a prediction of swarming so that he can
take the necessary preventive action, we need an apidictor substitute.

For the more inquisitive who want to explore the spectrum just for fun, then
the computer with appropriate software should fit the bill.  Knowing nothing
about it, I assume that this puts on screen a graph of the hive sound with
frequency horizontally and amplitude vertically.  Eddie Woods would have
borrowed a spectrum analyser from the BBC and done the job manually, tuning
to each frequency in turn, reading the meter and plotting the graph with
pencil on paper.

One point about the apidictor has just occurred to me.  Eddie listened to
the warble through a 225-285Hz band pass filter and noted that it stopped 2
days before the emergence of the swarm. (The calm before the swarm, you
might say!)  In his ABJ article, Olda Vancarta showed the warble continuing
right up to the departure but moving up in pitch to peak at 300 Hz.  It
could well be that Eddie did not notice this because it took the sound out
of the pass band of his filter.

If anyone has Olda's article, I suggest they look at the two graphs and
imagine them plotted on the same piece of paper. One could easily conclude
that the well known queenless moan is simply an extension of the 'unemployed
nurse warble'. Here is something that you computer buffs should study.

Remember that for any investigation to do with swarming, the biggest
difficulty is the fact that a colony does not spend much time doing it and
your window of opportunity is something like 3 weeks in every 2 years and
for some of that
 time operations will be interrupted by rain..For the other things Jerry
wants to study you need hives with and without varroa, tracheal mites, hive
beetles.  Lots of parameters.  Lots of hives. Lots of measurements.

You either need hundreds of hives or an army of experimenters.  You ought to
form a separate group - call yourselves the 'beeputers' - to agree standards
and a plan of action.

Finally, 2 points from Jerry's last posting.

1) The apidictor was a stand-alone instrument intended to be fed into a
human ear. I cannot visualise any circumstance where you would feed it into
a computer unless you needed more signal and used it as a pre-amplifier.
2) Your second paragraph suggests that knowledge of an impending swarm is
not much good unless you are there when it emerges.  In Britain we learn
procedures that can be used to prevent swarms; this protects our honey crop
and, more important, avoids bees escaping to infect our neighbours colonies
with varroa.  Don't you bother with such things where you live?

Rex Boys, Worcestershire, UK.