<First few times I looked a my Broodminder graphs I thought my hives were swarming every day, :-( I get 8-10 lbs. of bees outside regularly on a sunny day in NY.

Przemek>




Thanks Przemek  Our urban hive in Missoula drops 12-15#, the one in northern CA 10-12#




Our bi-directional bee counters from 27 colonies over several years indicate that bee foraging flight numbers are far higher than reported in the literature.


According to our counters, strong colonies  from May-August could easily reach over 70,000 to 180,000 foraging flights per day!  Some topped a quarter million flights.


For studies of bee foraging, modern technology often shows the flaws of visual counts.  DARPA didn't believe our counter number until we conducted a comparison of our counters against some from Belgium, and then manually assessed accuracy -we tried visually counting of flights at hive entrances and compared the counts to both our counter data and video that was laboriously examined frame by frame - the visual counts were always way off the mark.


The first really good example of scale hive data was produced by Buchmann and Thoenes -  they used a rather expensive lab balance


Buchmann, S. & Thoenes, S. 1990. The electronic scale honeybee colony as a management and research tool. Bee Science 1, 40–47.  I remember Steve saying he was impressed that the scale could detect a weight loss at night as the bees fanned to drive off excess water from the nectar.







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