A similar thing has happened to me in the past. Brought a phone dock from amazon, and when it arrived, it didn't fit my phone, looking at the serial number on the dock itself, it was for the previous model of phone but the packaging was for the latest.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23852177 explains it, with a quote from the article. They weren't able to map the whole thing, because of repeating patterns. That's now starting to change.
Not that it wasn't interesting. But I wonder how we landed in the situation where one company can cause entire world to watch same things at the same time.
In the video, the beekeeper says that the bees are acting very aggressively. As a layman, I can not tell the difference based on what I'm seeing. Would you please describe how these bees are acting visibly different from a 'normal' hive?
What did you think about his decision to first try to replace the queen, but ultimately destroy the colony?
Well the video at 3 minutes in, with the Bees flying all over the camera and attempting to sting him. You can see them flying towards the chap, and you can tell when they're doing that that, there's some intent that they want to sting you. I've noticed that they like to go for the face. Probably something to do with the chaps breath.
I went on a year long bee keeping course and I've had my hives just for this season. The hives that I have...I thought were much more aggressive than the hive I looked after on my course, But they're no where near as aggressive as those bees. I had a short period of them being more aggressive, and I think that was due to them taking nectar from oil seed rape (A variety of canola) or the sugared water that I was giving them. They've much calmed down now.
Compared with when the guy is meters away from the problem hive, with mine when I've cracked the hive open, doing an inspection, and I'm accidentally squishing them all over the place. I have a few trying to sting me, but not in the numbers that he's seeing.
I'm actually working about 10 meters away from my hive, in my garden now, and I'm not seeing any bees at all.
The only bit of wisdom that I could add to this discussion is that, on my course, I was told that the more genetic variation the bees have the more aggressive they are. If you import a queen from Italy, from an Italian variety, for the first year they'll be calm, but when you get subsequent generations of queens from that Italian queen they get more aggressive. I guess hybrid vigour makes them aggressive. I suppose especially so with hybrid varieties from Africa (Africanised), but I've not heard much about them in my local area.
Question -- why go through that much trouble to euthanize the hive? Why not just get a huge trash bag, bag up the entire colony, and then pump CO2 into it?
He mentions that that is another way to do it, the problem is you use dry ice to generate the CO2 and he doesn't know where to find that. I imagine that this process is not very simple; of course the dry ice goes on top and the cool carbon dioxide falls, but making sure that it pools and collects and fills the hive requires enclosing the hive from the bottom up which sounds nontrivial when it is that swarmy. I think the bottom is enclosed so one would get those huge things of plastic wrap and wrap around the sides over and over? Similar idea though. And then you would just need to know how long to wait for them to suffocate.
it didn't look like he went through very much effort at all to euthanize with Ajax though.
Some hives have enclosed floors. But modern hives, at least in the UK, now have a mesh floor. Which is there to reduce the numbers of a parasite, varroa. The mesh allows the parasite to fall out of the hive.
That's an interesting question. I'm not sure how you would pump CO2 into a bag and kill a colony. I'm not sure it's an accepted process for doing that. Maybe there's a chance you might accidentally euthanise yourself.
I imagine at the start of the process, he was hoping to just kill the queen, and the entire colony would survive. In that case the other bees would replace the queen, with an emergency queen cell, if this was to happen the queen would probably be as aggressive as the previous generation.
But he mentions that he intends on introducing a queen himself. In which case, I would have thought the colony would calm down.
But I have no idea how much by, because I've never been in this situation.
Put a big trash bag over the entire box, tie it up at the bottom, punch a small hole and put a hose from a cheap CO2 tank, ozone generator (also cheap), car exhaust, what have you?
If they were aggressive invasive bees wouldn't it make more sense to just kill all of them rather than replace the queen? Those aren't the sort of bees we want flying around our neighborhoods.
His method probably released hundreds of aggressive bees into the air everywhere , whereas if you bag it up they can't go anywhere.
Yes, the queen dictates the mood of the hive but it happens in 2 ways- her genetics, and her pheromones. It can take over a month before the mood of the hive would change after a re-queening. Even with a queen replacement, there are thousands of these aggressive bees already in there. With nearby kids and horses, and the incredible behavior of this hive, I don't blame him for deciding that the responsible step is euthanizing the whole colony.
I assumed same thing. The question is why would they put a traffic limit on it? Seems like it goes against the hope for the website of generating readers... though I guess if he's paying for all the servers himself it makes sense to block at a certain point.
Ah, this is a really useful topic, following on from the previous post about DIY weatherstations. I'm currently adding my data to wunderground, but I'm not getting a huge amount of value out of it.
I'm using weewx for my weather station. I pulled the weather station out of a bin at my former place of employment, which is an airmar 200wx, ultrasonic wind sensor that's typically used on boats. The humidity sensor doesn't work, so I wrote a python script, that acts as man in the middle, that reads in the data, and when it gets to the humidity values, it replaces them with numbers from a DHT22 humidity sensor instead.
Living in the PNW with many consecutive months of damp and cool weather, I've found most humidity sensors to be unreliable. Often their operating range is between 20% and 80%, which misses the very dry summers and very wet winters here. After a few weeks, I start getting bad readings, and finally failures.
Lately, I've had better results using a small 5VDC fan within the weather station enclosure, with the hope that dew won't form on the sensor (probably the main culprit). It's a Silicon Labs Si7021 temperature and humidity sensors (I2C). So far so good.
Yes, they do fail. I guess that's evident by the design of the weather station, as the humidity sensor is modular, so it can be replaced.
Unfortunately, I think this design also means it has a low ingress protection value. The unit I ended up with had the humidity sensor replaced and it still wasn't providing numbers. I think it may have spent a year or so out at sea on a buoy.
Thanks for the tip on weewx! Hadn't heard of it, and got my Davis Vantage 2 Pro I just inherited working and posting to weather underground with a raspberry pi + weewx. Real easy
Yeah, it's useful if you want a static website for your weatherstation. But I would quite like the current readings, to actually be current, rather than up to 5 mins old.
