mellifera

Yesterday Julie had decided to add another storey to our bees’ accommodation and so when i arrived today to check the Piezo i was amazed to find this big loop of bees around the entry to the hive. At first it looked as if the bees were climbing all over each other to get back into the hive after being disturbed but, as i watched, i saw that bees flying up with full pollen sacks made their way straight into the hive through this crowd at the entry without any trouble or hesitation at all ???

I took some sound recordings then Julie came & lifted out the frame with the Piezo in it. Now the bees have built comb all over the Piezo but they are leaving the wire uncovered.

When the frame was replaced i took another recording. The really exciting news is that Andrew- with his more sophisticated sound capture software – has been able to isolate the bee sounds from my previous recordings (snail-mailed to him on a CD).  So this means that we are actually succeeding in recording vibrations using this Piezo embedded in the wax after all

13th November – just a footnote to this post: it seems that the bees elected NOT to move into the new storey added to this hive but instead, soon after the photo of the loop at the hive entrance was taken, they decided to swarm instead. Their behaviour at the hive entrance was a preliminary to this.