>What is the effect of light inside a pitch dark
>beehive?

        In a move which could well turn out to be even less warm, fuzzy &
popular than any of my contributions so far, I will say I'm baffled at this
unanimous belief that inside a beehive is pitch dark.
        In daytime, enough light gets in the typical entrance that gloom,
rather than blackness, prevails.  Sure, 4 storeys up (failing upper
entrances, wedges, shims, propped-up covers, or other sensible arrangement
for ventilation which also happens to let in light) it must be pretty
gloomy by our standards.  But even there, an animal such as a drone which
devotes so much of its surface to eyes may well be able to see far more
sensitively than we can.
        At night, for all I know the moon and even stars may affect life
near the entrance.  As far as I can see it's an empirical matter.   Plenty
of animals can see far better than we can at night, so intercepting a
couple orders of magnifude of the light flux may still leave enough for
bees to make some use of.

        I reiterate the suggestion of flexible mini-video snoopers in
hives, preferably with flexible capillaries lashed to them to sniff into a
gas chromatograph (with a mass spectrometer slapped on the end of that, if
we want to get a lot of science done).  From what little I know of video
camera sensitivity, I tentatively suppose this will work at least in
daytime in the brood box without any extra lighting.

R