Would be lovely if it worked........ but.......
Related patents in place in 1988, and again in 1998. A patent linked to this thing in 2001.....renewed a couple of times, then abandoned (due to non payment of the fee apparently) in 2008.
If it truly were the magic bullet I suspect we would all know about it by now........some 29 years after initial patent, and some 16 years after the direct ancestor of this device appeared.
It would also have been manufactured in a cheap provenance and be available for very little.
Several years ago I had a visit from some German guys who were being taken round the country to meet key players (at least ones who would give them a listen) and they had a strange device ( a box with a secret set up inside) in the back of their car that they used 'to charge up' special clay discs that they then inserted into the hive close to or even within the broodnest. (Apparently it only required 0.6w to do this.)
It was claimed that the field from these discs promoted colony contentment and boosted their health, and that this made them able to cope with varroa on their own.
Would I consent to them running a trial on some of my hives? Not being one to be unhelpful to researchers I agreed, and some long redundant dummy boards were unearthed and they got on with using a disc cutter to make a hole in the dummies so the clay disc could be inserted and held in place with silicon.
So later that day we went off out to the field and opened some hives and the end frame of the nest was removed and the dummy with fitted disc put in its place and pressed across firmly against the last frame of those remaining.
To my surprise the guys, all of them, said you could hear a change of sound in the hive to a deeper more settled tone, and in their opinion the bees were happy and their changed sound indicated that. (I heard no change whatsoever.)
They went on their way, but before they did I got their offer document that detailed the price of the discs (not cheap) and their fee for coming to recharge the discs, which needed to be done every few months. Again not cheap. The discs also remained their property and when ding the freshening up visit they needed the existing discs back.
Weeks passed and there was no difference at all between the hives with discs and the others, bar the faffing about that having a dummy board that protruded into the end comb caused (large circular recess on the face of the comb or all joined together by the bees and thus a possibility of rather 'hauling the guts out of' the comb. (that made them rather 'discontented').
They called back to ask how we were getting on with the discs and to see if I was ready for them to come, recharge the discs, and extend their experiment up to full scale in our unit, and said I was the only one that had not reported any advantage. They were rather disappointed that I did not want to go into their method in a bid way. They never came to get their discs back and I never heard from them again. Apparently they did several in the UK at the time and I wonder if anyone else gave their ideas a chance. Not sure if this 'happy frequency' the discs were supposed to emit is in any way related to this.
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last night and the told me it was nothing new and to look up the late Eddie F. Woods who invented The Apidictor and patented, and marketed it in the 1960s. So i did and came across these articles even one to build your own.
Originally Posted by Greengage
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