From: "Nancy M McKenna" <nancy.mckenna@attbi.com>
Date: Fri, 2 Aug 2002 09:37:17 -0500
To: <BiologicalBeekeeping@yahoogroups.com>
Subject: Re: Do Bees want various cell sizes? (bushel)

Pav, "flogging a lame horse again", got WAY off track. The point was, from
my reading of previous posts, that bees can live in a variety of boxes, and
even skeps. And looking to some older writing, a skep was about the size of
a bushel.

Chris noted that an official bushel is 2219.36 cubic inches.

If you work with the interior dimensions of a deep super, you'll find that
it is about a bushel in capacity.

However, there is a problem with the idea of skeps=hives. If you read in
Foxfire (book 2?) there is mention of making a skep for temporary quarters,
but that one usually cuts down a bee tree, cuts out the bee section & stand
it upright again, make a door into that section that can be opened to
harvest honey but replaced so that the bees can continue to live in the bee
tree as their permenant hive.

Going to the medieval period - see some illustrations at:
http://www.praiseofglory.com/bees.htm
you will see that bees were not kept in skeps, but that they had sectional
hives and also bee houses.

Therefore, if we were looking only to history, it may be that skeps=nuc were
kept in gardens because the bees were there primarily for polination, not
honey production. Whereas for honey/wax production, sectional hives were
used.

Which brings us back to the fact that bees will live most places that they
deem alright if they have sufficient capacity. And from other posters here,
that the median feral bee comb size for worker brood is around 4.9.

Therefore, a much better tangent may be to ask, "why are there still feral
bees in some select locatons (someone is watching a longstanding hive in a
rock, etc). Do they die out and new bees move there? Is the stock good at
removing mites? If one can see into these hives, how are they arranged (how
about one of those scopes doctors use to see inside a person? can one be fed
into one of these hives?)"

And as to what size the bees *want* - I should think that it would be an
interesting observation to see what bees build once they are down to 4.9
size, but that as an industry/focus group we need to first get our bees to
their original size so that they can survive without *any* outside chemicals
_before_ starting a new series of research projects.

Nancy

Handy Chart:
If you have mult. by to get
___________________________
centimeters 0.3937 inches
inches 2.54 centimeters
meters 3.28 feet
feet 0.3048 meters
meters 1.094 yards
yards 0.9144 meters
km 0.62 miles
miles 1.609 km
gram 0.03527 ounces
ounces 28.349 grams
kilograms 2.2046 pounds
pounds 0.4536 kilograms
liters 0.26417 gallons US
Gallon US 3.785 liters
fluid oz US 29.57 cc
cc 0.0338 fluid oz US