During the bee-pocalypse craze, I was enlisted by a friend of a friend artist to wrangle the bees in an "art project" where the art would be comb, but the goal was to create a single "giant frame" of comb honey, which would be eaten by the people who came to the art gallery where it would be displayed.
Multiple colonies were needed, all of them denied any honey storage area, and with pheromones mixed via forced ventilation ducts to circulate the air between all 5 colonies. Modified migratory covers connected each hive to the shared "honey super" with metal A/C ductwork. There was no fighting, which was reassuring.
They did draw some significant comb from the giant sheet of wired wax foundation (carefully assembled to hold standard sheets of foundation in an array), and they did store honey, but we did not get the 3 foot wide scaled-up "deep frame" filled to capacity. The artist had wanted a 6-foot wide comb, so when even the 3-foot wide version did not emerge in "honey show quality", she wandered off and did other kinds of "food art".
It was never explained to me how they expected to transport the giant comb from the Van Cortland Park greenhouses in the Bronx, NYC down to Miami where the "showing was to take place", and I suggested that the partly-completed comb be taken down to Florida where the bees would enjoy a longer foraging season and warmer weather, but no dice.
I also never verified that all 5 hives were contributing. Every hive had all drawn comb, so there was nowhere else for anyone to draw comb, and the ducts were bee-space compliant, so there was no room for comb in the ductwork, but I should have had bee counters in each duct run. But this was "art", not "science".
***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software. For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html
|