Tuesday, May 20, 2008

when bees attack...

This new york post story is really interesting. (did i really just say that?)
Bees keep swarming in New York City and apparently it's only going to get worse.
"We are seeing more colonies surviving in the wild and surviving well enough that they swarm." But the real question is, how do we reconcile this statement with repeated stories of bee's dying off that we've written about before. Twice. The New York Post couldn't be wrong, could it?

UPDATE (5.22.08): They just keep attacking. This time in arizona.

1 comment:

jg3 said...

Bees swarm when a colony thrives to the extent that they *can* survive as two colonies. Wild colonies are built in trees and cracks and attics and other oddly-shaped structures. Beekeepers hives are designed for maximum efficiency in opening up the hive and extracting the honey. They are very regularly shaped and have a lot of surface area and therefore a lot of space. This lends to the notion that bees in such environments are susceptible to mites much more than they would be in a more naturally (irregularly) shaped hive.

I'm jus' sayin'.