Re. Drifting.

Bees seem to drift, under various predicaments, not necessarily due to
disorientation caused by the beekeeper’s stacking the identical boxes
tightly.  Do a little experiment with nurse bees, for example.  If you
shake the inner cover, attached with hundreds of young bees, over the
entrance of a weak colony in the distance, they will readily be accepted
with Zero fighting, a fact we exploit to strengthen colonies by giving
them all stages of brood frames, coming from various colonies.  When I
pair two colonies side by side, I always make sure their landing boards
are painted differently; however, I have a sneaky suspicion that they
drift, unawares, till they settle down, and then a little more even after,
just as in the rare case of continous robbing.  Furthermore, any adult bee
hauling in nectar, it is well documented, will be accepted most of the
time by strangers; in this archive and elsewhere someone had already done
the color experiment—-dumping bees in no man’s land, marked with color,
and finding them back about an hour later in the neighboring colonies in
the vicinity.  Stragglers, too, eventually join back to the parent colony
or are absorbed by neighboring colony, it appears, for I have yet to
witness a solitary honey bee, an oxymoron given their social existence.
Bees are, I find, resilient, flexible, and constantly adapting—-all the
more remarkable considering their simple yet elegant design.  Look at the
size of their head.

Yoon

Shawnee, OK

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