Honeybees 'Whoop'

If not topical, at least interesting. It's very dark in the hives, especially at night, so bees must be going by feel. Maybe this is simply a way for bees to keep their little bit of space, so they can do their work.

I've been loading up our hives with sensors, in a kind of mindless way, with sensors that are easy to install. Tiny electret mics, yes, but embedded accelerometers, no.

We need lots of cameras, oops, too hard.

My newest PCB, called TH-stick, probes into the middle of the hive, six sensor ICs, 14 channels. A finished set of them will be arriving soon.

Measure (and listen to) e-field!

On a sunny day (20 May 2019 18:13:47 -0700) it happened Winfield Hill wrote in :

Are Bs bothered by IR light? If not then some cheap cameras with MJPEG stream output could work. Avoid cameras with H264 compression etc if you need to see fast motion, that only gives blurred Iframes, High speed MJPEG cameras would be better, Depends on what you want to see., wings flapping, or just where the bees are at any given time. Lens cleaning? Could indeed get complictiatiateded.

They're not bothered by light, the local museum has a glass box hive with the exit leading outdoors.

yeah

Fascinating ! Both bee stories !

You could make a B-movie.

My Samsung S7 does a good job of slow-mo of bees on the flowers moving around and wings flapping.

One of the most fascinating things on bees I saw on TV. Bees do a dance near the hive that signals to the other bees the direction and distance to where the good flowers are at that they found.

It's actually within the hive, in the dark. So tactile message is ideal! I've seen the other use of this communication. It happens in the open when a swarm heads off to found another colony. The bees form a temporary bivouac and scouts look for somewhere permanent. They come back and do a waggle dance just as if foraging. Eventually a consensus forms and all the bees head off to their new home. Magic!

Mike.

In 2013 a bivouac lighted on one of my trees for a short while.

Thank you, 73,

Thanks for that story...

Mike.

I've had that three times in my garden.

Once on the lawn, of all places.

Once on a bush, 6ft up. When discussing that with other people in the village, I found a near neighbour kept bees.

Again, on the same bush. My near neighbour was delighted to come and collect the swarm :)

I wonder if it was his bees. When the queen becomes unhappy with the hive, or worried about disturbances, she will make the hive abscomb. They call it abscomb, rather than abandon, because the bees take as much of the honey as they can with them. Hah, it may have been his queen, and she may not have been so happy about it, unless she got a new fresh hive.

Interesting thought; annoyed I didn't think of it.

They gave no indication of having "lost" a swarm, but that is absence of evidence.

Abscomb is an interesting word. I suspect it could be applied to other phenomena such as dictators that flee the country.

The bog-standard google search thinks "abscond". I'll check in an old Websters dictionary tomorrow.

abscond, yes.

It s a perfectly cromulent word. He absconded with the money. See google.

Like "quiz".

I prefer "He abscombed with the money" :)

I don't. But on the other hand on the original topic of honeybees on a comb it could be appropriate!

Mike.

...

See, I thought it was a clever portmanteau. Should've left well enough alone. :^)

Tim