Following the Wild Bees by Thomas D. Seeley

Author:Thomas D. Seeley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2016-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

Timing Bees to Estimate Distance to Home

Now that you have a squadron of bees flying confidently to and from your comb, many of them labeled with eye-catching paint marks for individual identification, you are ready to start recording the departure and return times of these bees to measure how long they are away from your comb when they make trips back to their secret residence. We will see that these “away times,” if used judiciously, can give you a good estimate of the distance from your comb to their home. You will want to get a sense of this distance as quickly as possible after you have established a beeline, because the distance varies greatly among hunts and it strongly affects the difficulty of solving the mystery of your bees’ home address. Reviewing the records in my notebook for bee hunting, I see that for my 21 successful hunts made over the last 15 years—18 in the Arnot Forest, south of Ithaca, New York; 2 in the Powdermill Nature Reserve, east of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and 1 in the Catskill Mountains, near Acra, New York—the distance from my starting point to the bees’ home varied widely from hunt to hunt. The shortest was 160 feet and the longest was 1.2 miles. The average was 0.46 miles. The notebook also contains records of another 8 hunts that I started but aborted, usually because the distance to the bees’ dwelling place was so great that the captured bees would not bring others to my feeder comb. Twice, though, I had a bad day and failed to find the bees’ hidden nest, even though I knew I had gotten close to it. Failures in bee hunting certainly do happen, despite the bee hunter’s strongest efforts and most fervent desires, and will be discussed in chapter 7.

My rough guidelines relating how long the bees are gone from your comb and how far it is to their home are as follows. If the bees are gone only 2–4 minutes, the bee tree is very close, possibly within sight. If the bees are gone 5–9 minutes, the bee tree is less than a mile away. If the bees are gone 10–15 minutes, the bee tree is far away but still findable. If the bees are gone more than 15 minutes, then things are pretty hopeless because the bee tree is probably more than a mile and a half away. Bees are not likely to recruit nest mates over such a great distance, so probably you will never get a heavy traffic of bees at your comb. When this happens, the best plan of action is to abandon the stand, move about a mile in the direction your bees have flown, and restart the whole process by capturing more bees off flowers at the new location.

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