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Informed Discussion of Beekeeping Issues and Bee Biology

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Subject:
From:
James Fischer <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Informed Discussion of Beekeeping Issues and Bee Biology <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Thu, 13 Nov 2014 07:45:38 -0500
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I've seen dancing as attempted by beekeepers at various social events
associated with conferences, and it isn't a pretty sight.

 

But bees, when sleep-deprived by enforced motion, can't dance very well
either.

 

There does not seem to be a published paper on this yet, so all we have is a
short article in "Wired":

http://www.wired.com/2014/11/berrett-klein-honeybees/

http://tinyurl.com/n75z7ka

 

The extrapolation to migratory trucking seems to ignore the fact of modern
air-ride trucks.

If this was a significant issue, there should have been a measureable
improvement between the 1970s and today.

 

Further, it would be simple to outfit a few hives with accelerometers and
data loggers for a season to find the worst case vibration, and to but a
hive on a "shake table" to deliver the actual vibration of a truck ride to
one hive, while not vibrating a second, and watch them dance about the same
feeder.  The fiddling about with magnets seems a very convoluted approach,
apparently the idea was to sleep-deprive exactly half of a cohort of sister
workers with near-identical emergence dates.

 

For the record, my bees stayed strapped down on flatbeds for the entire
apple pollination season, and were towed in a "freight train" of linked
trailers at slow speeds up mountain roads between orchards.  I was somehow
able to convince my pollination clients that, lo and behold, bees could fly,
and if they cut their understory growth (dandelions!) before pollination,
that there was no need to do more than park the trailers in the orchards.
Saved tons of work and time, and eliminated the whole "The Swinger broke
down, so let's try and use a bobcat" nonsense.  But even those rides were
likely more bumpy than a trip in an air-ride trailer over the interstate
highway system.

 

 

 


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