This fine work on insulation and temperatures raises a question about the
northern limit of the ability of a feral bee colony (assume a well-prepared
one) to survive a winter.
One thing I stumbled across years ago was that bee-lining in the George
Washington and Jefferson National Forests in VA was actually a process of
releasing bees from several clearings and triangulating the location of a
decent-sized oak tree. The bees invariably preferred oak trees an
overwhelming percentage of the time, as they remain strong and viable trees
even when a branch breaks off, the wood rots, and a hollow bole is formed,
some even approaching the diameter of the trunk.
But oaks aren't native to Alaska, Hawaii, or Idaho, Montana, and most of
Nevada. Hawaii is too far from any existing oak trees (despite Monty
Python's speculation about coconuts - "Supposing *two* swallows carried it
together!") , and The Central West of the US is just too dry.
http://alaskaplants.org does not list any oaks, but the US Forest Service
reports that the Kenai Peninsula now has red and burr oaks, one assumes a
result of both climate change and campers/hikers who did not clean their
tarps and tents and spread the seeds. (Funny how no one is as upset about
this sort of "invasive" as they are about things like honey bees, but I
digress...)
1884 Sargent Arboreal Map shows oaks only as far North as the western side
of Lake Winnipeg, and a more recent range map for oaks did not come easily
to hand.
So where to feral colonies take up residence where there are no oaks? I
understand that man-made structures are also "ideal cavities" in many cases,
but I mean other than man-made cavities.
In Canada, the major milestones in beekeeping seem to have been, first, the
development of a reliable package bee business to replace bees that were
"sulfured" each fall, followed by "wrapping" entire pallets of colonies, and
then, the more recent developments in indoor overwintering with adequate
ventilation and temperature control. But this is as alien to the keeping of
bees within their natural range as the "keeping bees" that is done on the
cliffs in Bhutan. (First, you hike/climb up to the 8,000 to 9,000 ft
level, THEN you free climb or are belayed as you climb a steep cliff, and
THEN you tie yourself off and swing slowly in the breeze as you attempt to
harvest some honey from a hive of these amazing massive "Himalayan giant
honey bees", each one about an inch long. It's insane. I loved it. Well
worth the trip. Got stung through an alleged "bee suit", stinger like a
vaccination needle. Lived to tell the tale, everyone had a good time.)
As an aside, the practice of capturing foraging bees, free-feeding them for
a bit to let them "tank up", and then releasing single bees from
widely-spaced clearings, one at a time, watching them circle several times
to get their (solar) bearings and then fly off on a compass vector, does
work well, and is efficient, as the hundreds of owners of the 3-chamber
bee-lining boxes I designed, and my dad built for several decades before he
gave up woodworking can attest. The pooh-poohing of the technique in a
recently-published book seems to have come from someone unwilling to get
down on hands and knees to be able to look up to track the bee against the
sky, and having a lack of large enough clearings in which to do so. So, the
catalog houses now carry cheaply-made pine two-chamber boxes, and a book
that instructs the user to use the box exactly as one could use a dish of
scented feed on a portable stand to not "line bees", but instead to create a
physical "line OF bees" commuting between hive and feeder dish, a slow
process that evinces the tedium of the existence of the typical grad
student. But rather than acknowledging that there is more than one way to
skin a cat, the book actively disses "vectoring". Rude.
I went to several state-level beekeeping "field day" events, and everyone
who gave it a try was able to quickly learn to spot the bees circling and
flying off on consistent vectors back towards the hives, so I'll quote the
phrase inaccurately attributed to Galileo: "Eppure si muove" ("Even so, it
moves"), as I am not about to spend my time writing "yet another beekeeping
book", just as I am apparently the only remaining beekeeper to not have a
blog, a vanity website, nor a social-media presence. (Bee-L is still a
listsrv to which one subscribes in the ancient, honored traditional way, so
it would be "anti-social media" for most everyone.)
I still have my cherry and mahogany prototype bee-lining box with the Lloyd
Spear "Sundance" wire mesh escape cones he was nice enough to sell me - no
nails in the whole thing - its all joinery. Dad rejected the "pure joinery"
approach as "un-manufactureable" before he even turned the thing over to
look at the backside.
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