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Date: | Mon, 14 Apr 2008 11:05:56 EDT |
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Drifting obviously occurs if the hives are all oriented in the same
direction, in lines, with little marking, and is especially bad if a cross wind tends
to blow acoss the hives. The end boxes will increase in numbers.
That's the traditional description of drifting. Some years ago, we fitted a
colonies with bi-directional counters and found another form of 'drifting'.
It also occurred when abandoned bees (such as would blow off a semi going
down a highway) found new homes in a nearby apiary.
Within any beeyard are colonies that attract bees other than their own.
They can be ANY place within the yard. Each day they have a higher number of
bees coming into the hive than left (percent return rate is 1-5% higher than
for their neighbors.
In the same yard, some other colonies regularly lose a small percentage of
bees each day, compared to their neighbors.
When we released marked bees in 4 compass directions from the center of a
test beeyard (the released bees came from another bee operation miles away), we
found that many of these bees, from all 4 directions, found the apiary, and
most of these bees went to the same colonies - which were often deep in the
yard, Not on the margins.
Whether this is 'drift' in the normal sense is a semantics question. But it
does happen, and most beekeepers are unaware of it - except for the
observation that in any beeyard there are always a few super achieving colonies and a
few laggards. From our counter data, the over achievers collect bees from
their neighbors. The others lose bees each day, presumably to the the better
colonies.
Jerry
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