Marked my apairy sites and gave them a 3 mile forage area. Interesting when you see the overlaps. For our club site there is an overlap with one of my sites, however in practice they are quite separate as there is a dirty big hill between them. Good fun though
I wonder just how big (and how dirty!) the hill has to be. I remember some researchers looked at waggle dances of bees flying round hills and they integrated the navigation into one direct dance.
I've stood on Wester Ross (and other, it is just that the Wester Ross ones were memorable) Munros and had bumble bees fly up, sometimes do a circuit or two, and zip off on their merry way. They'd be hardy types though.
Is there a similar addon you can use for google earth?
How big a radius do you want, Jon? Isn't Google maps just the internet version of Google earth? There's an option in the top right-hand corner to change between Map and Satellite views - or is there some other information on Google Earth not available on Google Maps?
Kitta
There is.
I think i found it on this site ?
http://www.freemaptools.com/radius-around-point.htm
export stuff at the bottom.
Cheers GG.
I will give that a go.
I have circles drawn around various apiaries in google earth but I had to do them approximately by manually joining up points.
MC. I have a load of my own data in google earth, placemarkers marking other beekeepers apiaries and stuff like that.
I wouldn't restrict yourself to three miles, although that comes from many flights being up to 1.5 miles and therefore 2 x 1.5 is a fairly safe distance to shift a colony.
I've seen bees at my apiary near Errol (on the same day) coming home with the white stripe of Himalayan balsam (they have to fly to the Tay for that) and pointing 5 km away to the SW, and others pointing at heather on a hill 7-8km to the NE. There was one fine day quite a few years ago not far from you GG, just W of Oldmeldrum, when doing some field work on foraging and the approach of a dark cloud caused a mass exit from the field in the direction of a large apiary we knew about 10 km away up the side of a slope W of Rothienorman.
Francis Ratniek's group recorded waggle dances pointing at the moors 'near' Sheffield (11km away, as far as von Frisch took it as well), and there was a 1930s study in Wyoming by John Eckert who recorded foraging 13.5 km away. There is a nice wee article here.
G.
I have just used the link in this thread to relate distance from my apiary (500m, 1 km and 3km radius) to where I have seen my bees foraging. The 1km radius corresponds with the greatest distance I have recorded. This seems to
Work I have found on the foraging range of honey bees (J Insect Sci. 2011;11:144. Foraging range of honey bees, Apis mellifera, in alfalfa seed production fields. Hagler JR1, Mueller S, Teuber LR, Machtley SA, Van Deynze A.) showed that:
• distances travelled by marked bees (leaving to returning from a hive) ranged from 45 m to 5983 m
• on average bees were recovered at about 800m from their apiary
• the recovery rate of bees decreased exponentially as the distance from the apiary of origin increased.
From this, I take that:
1. Sometimes a bee does not do much foraging (50m) when it leaves the hive and at other times it can fly nearly 6km while foraging.
2. Mostly bees stay within about a km of their hive when foraging.
I think it would take an exceptionally dry, warm, windless period in Fermanagh to tempt my bees to forage usefully on the heather about 3km away.
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