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.

Julie once more helped me by opening up the hive & lifting out the frame with the Piezo inserted in it.

As you can see the bees have built up the wax over the Piezo, but not so much over the wire. They’ve even formed some quite regular comb containing some honey.

Going back to the earlier point about sound capture in the hive & calling upon some other research we’ve been doing it looks like we’ll have to try another approach taking into account the ways in which vibrations are best transmitted throough honeycomb – in art & in science experiments are just that: EXPERIMENTS!!!