Three Comments:

1) I know from experience that old brood frames decrease in cell size as the cells are used over and over.  At some point, the bees will deconstruct and rebuild.   When I was doing landscape scale pollution studies in Seattle in the 80s, we built small, entrance-mounted pollen traps.  We later found that we had to give each beekeeper two traps - the hole size was smaller in one than the other.  The problem was that the trap that worked best for most beekeepers had holes that were too small for the bees of a few beekeepers, the bees struggled to pass through.

2) After MT St Helens' spread ash across the NW, I did a study for the USDA Forest Service to see what effect, if any, ash had on spruce budworm.

We split the study into two trials - one where we used Larry Atkin's implosion chamber to dust spruce budworm with ash; the other where we feed budworm ash contained in a laboratory agar diet commonly used by research labs studying budworm.

Dusting killed budworm larvae.  Feeding had little or no mortality effect, even with 50% ash in dry materials of the agar diet.  But, at the highest ash concentrations, we got pigmy adult budworm, about 1/2 size of the controls.

3) In 1995, I set up several Smart Hives (electronics, bi-directional counters, scales, RH sensors, and pollen traps) and drove them from MT to Maryland.  The system had been tested in Montana - everything worked in Missoula at 3200 ft elevation.   Bees went through pollen traps with no problem.  Got to Maryland, the pressure transducer scale system had to be re-calibrated - the Maryland site was on the Army's DoD Edgewood facility, only a few yards from the waters of Chesapeake Bay (just a few feet above sea level).

What was really strange, the same bees and hives that in Montana had been flying and literally running through the pollen traps, couldn't fit through the same pollen traps in Maryland!  It was similar to people getting swollen feet when on long airplane flights.  And it wasn't a short term issue, we had to switch to a different pollen trap.



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