Bees & Beekeeping: Present & Past
Toward a Super-attractive Bait Hive: Capturing Expensive Lost Swarms From the Apiary
To help beekeepers capture their lost (expensive) swarms, I have been investigating various practical ways to enhance the attraction of bait hives. I began with the amount of comb in a bait hive. The logic is, a bait hive with more comb allows the bees to store more honey for winter survival instead of converting that collected nectar into wax for combs. If scout bees (consistently) choose a bait hive with more comb, it indicates they should be able to perceive the amount of comb.
In spring 2024, I conducted a preliminary study of the hypothesis that scout bees could perceive the amount of comb in a bait hive. [See “Can Scout Bees Perceive the Amount of Comb in a Bait Hive?” ABJ August 2024.] I had bait hives with two amounts of comb. One (called the 2x) had twice as much comb as the other bait hive (called the 1x). A pair of bait hives (1x and 2x), several feet apart, comprised a test site (see Figure 1). I had multiple test sites. Seven times the scout bees chose between the two bait hives, and every time they chose the 2x hive. The probability of correctly guessing all those choices is quite low, only .0078. So if random guessing is unlikely, then maybe there is some association between the amount of comb in a bait hive and scout bees’ ability to perceive it.
This study does not indicate that the additional comb is actually causing the scout bees to choose the bait hive with the most comb. Other unknown effects might have been responsible for that result (the seven correct choices), even if unlikely.
It can be hard to imagine what one of these unknown effects could be. Here is a possibility. Maybe some of the hive bodies were especially attractive to the scout bees while others were not. More of the attractive hive bodies by chance could have ended up with the 2x bait hives. Then the scout bees were really choosing the attractive hive bodies, not the extra comb. Is this unlikely? Yes, but here is the crucial question: What in the design of the preliminary study broke up any possible hive-body effect, either for or against the 2x? Answer: Nothing. Therefore, the hive bodies need to be randomly scattered among the test sites to break up any possible hive-body effect, which leads to the following …
