# General beekeeping > Bee blether >  Bees are brighter in the morning!

## Trog

It seems bees are 'morning people' http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-10892913.  Perhaps the research will have some useful application someday but I do wonder why anyone would want to spend so much time and money finding that out!  :Confused:

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## chris

> but I do wonder why anyone would want to spend so much time and money finding that out!


How about you orient your hive to catch the first rays of morning light so they are out earlier ?

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## gavin

I know Trog, isn't it amazing what tenuous excuses researchers sometimes find to spend lots of research cash?   :Stick Out Tongue: 

Salut Chris!!  Et bienvenu a SBAi!

Ca va bien a Provence? (or is it en/dans)

Do you remember showing me a paper on a study of colony losses in France?  We Scots have a need to remind ourselves what has already been done internationally.  And how well it was done.  There's no need to reinvent wheels, nor to construct them using wet newspaper when you need the cart to carry a dozen heather honey laden hives homewards.  So they say.

G.

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## chris

> Ca va bien a Provence? (or is it en/dans)
> 
> 
> 
> .


*en*
Gavin, clear a little space and I'll pm you
C.

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## gavin

Have done - apologies, you'd think that the Admin would have his inbox in order .....

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## Trog

Hello, Chris.  I have one colony which flies earlier in the day than the others, despite not getting the sun any earlier.  Would have to remove such variables as colony temperament to make it a proper experiment.

We stayed in a Melrose B & B in September where they had proper honey on the table.  Turned out the owner had a relative in France who was a beekeeper originally from Scotland.

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## gavin

So, Trog, now that we're discussing bee fieldwork, if you were to try to use flight activity at hives across many sites and on all sorts of different days to judge some small effect from something that might or might not interfere with the colony's activity, how would you cope with all the other interfering variables?  There are dozens of them of course.

Sounds like a really tricky problem to me, even with experts in field studies and multivariate statistics available it is unlikely to work, isn't it?

On a completely unrelated topic  :Wink:   I see that Steven Gerard http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode...s_2_Episode_1/ (about 8 min in) has quite a good sense of what might be wrong with bees these days.  Why can everyone not be so sensible?!

G.

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## Trog

Well, thank you for the link, which we ended up watching.  Loved the Robert Peston weather forecast.  Oh, yes, and the bit about bees was good.

As for the first two paragraphs it's worth remembering you're addressing someone who greets the first bees seen on the snowdrops and asks them to convey her regards to the queen.   Someone asked me this evening if sing to my bees.  I replied that as my horse didn't appreciate it, I hadn't tried it with the bees.  We did go so far as to check what note the bees were humming when working the cotoneaster by the front door.  It was B.  (Yes, really!)

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## Rosie

Trog, you didn't say whether you detected the note B by perfect pitch or by the use of some electronic signal analyser but either way with that capability you might be able to make use of the apidictor theory.  For those who don't know about it or need to refresh their memories you can read about it here:

www.beedata.com/data2/listen/listenbees.htm

Sorry if I have wandered off topic.

Rosie

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## Trog

Fascinating!  I've saved it to my Favourites.  Interesting that they came up with B, too.  Used to have nearly perfect pitch but out of practice now.  However all 3 of our family can hold a note in our heads long enough to get to the piano - and we all agreed on the note!

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## Jon

Very interesting.
I notice the author thought queen piping was quite rare.
It's not if you use apideas.
There were a couple of nights when we transported about 20 apideas to a mating site in the back of a car and you could hear virgins piping away to each other in neighbouring Apideas.
I've also noticed piping if you have two nucs with virgin queens side by side.

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