> Curious,  how does one confirm drift?  Seems to me given the oddball genetics of mites would make this a slight conundrum.

My son did a trial for his high school science project back around 1993 where I set up six nucleus colonies for him.  He then marked bees in each of the nucs with different coloured liquid paper.  Each morning he would check each nuc and record the coloured bees in each of the nucs.  The nucs had been set out in line.  Each day there were different coloured bees in different hives so it showed there was significant drift between nucs.  The pity was that we asked for the project to be returned but the school disposed of it in their clean up.

The late Cam Jay has a lot of published work on drift. I recall talking with him back in 1988 when he was here in Australia.  He said for northern hemispheres the drift is commonly from east to west and north to south.  In the southern hemisphere it is east to west also but south to north.

Recently the CSIRO in Tasmania in Australia have developed a tag for bees which they can track bees with.  They showed also that there is significant drift of the tagged bees from hive to hive.  I recall in one case one bees had visited different hives over different days before returning to the original hive.

So there is plenty of evidence to confirm drift.

Trevor Weatherhead
Australia

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