A Bee in Math

[aggienaut]

   Wrote another letter-to-the-editor to the OC Register at work today. As usual, it was about some self-described expert who removed a colony live and advocated live removals. In addition to disputing their expert credentials and putting forth Dave's overwhelming qualifications, as usual (and last time I listed them I think I neglected to mention that he has also been deposed as a bee expert a number of times in lawsuits he would not have otherwise had a connection to), and taking issue with their advocation of live removal and release, I homed in on something specific -- by way of discrediting their "expert" description, and correcting a factual error, I took issue with the "experts" statement that the colony they removed in the article had "over 100,000 bees."
   This, you see, is quite easily proven a mathematical impossibility.* A queen is capable of laying a whopping 2,500 eggs a day (and there'll be only one queen), and worker bees who make up 99.99% of the hive live an average of 24.7 days, so you can simply multiply these together and find that the maximum size is 61,750 individuals!
   Now, I noted that one could certainly allow for bees to live a little bit longer (the lifespan is actually specifically 500 flying hours I think, and if the temperature were to drop below 54f the bees would pretty much stop flying around for winter -- but that doesn't happen here) or maybe the queen to be extremely virile, but thats not going to push the population beyond 70,000. No "expert" would ever estimate a random unnoteworthy exposed colony by a church to have 100,000 bees in it.

   * I've heard actually that some yellowjacket colonies at least get so big and crazy that there are queens at opposite ends of the hive who never meet, making it effectively a giant conjoined hive. I dunno if that could happen with a honeybee colony, but I wouldn't absolutely rule out some kind of freakish aberration like that. But in general, beehive populations do not exceed 60,000.


   In other news, I happened across this random photographer's photos on flickr and they're kind of amazing.

Comments

[bobolly.livejournal.com]

Simon wanted to show you this if you haven't already seen it:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/317/5843/1304

and to tell you that you should get a job for the department of agriculture. Happy bee-warring!

[emosnail.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I don't have access to that specific article but I'd seen the story elsewhere. "Israeli acute paralysis virus" apparently

Thank you.

[ongo.livejournal.com]

Kris,

Thank you for that reply on the PSU forum. As you may know, the student fee scam that the trip to Honolulu illustrates is tightly woven into the political powers at Portland State. We were surprised how many people actually went to Rudy's defense when we accused him at first of misusing student fees. There is a fierce alliance between the student government that breaks the rules and the administration that allows them to be broken.

When we first brought forth articles of impeachment against Rudy, the Chief Justice for ASPSU didn't get the significance of this crisis. But we withdrew our appeal when he announced his resignation. We're getting the word out to the student body to form our base of support.

In addition to student support at PSU, we were looking into other Universities that have been having this same problem, or have found ways to correct it. Was the misuse at UC Davis solved?

Re: Thank you.

[emosnail.livejournal.com]

Fortunately, at Davis we have an ASUCD Business Manager who is a career employee of the university who has the authority to deny any ASUCD expenditures he deems to be inappropriate. Fortunately this business manager happens to be a good person who does his job well (I fear what'll happen when he retires and we get someone new), who for example shot down one ASUCD president's attempts to use student fees to pay for personal parking tickets and a limo to the "presidents ball" he put on, among other things.


Berkeley has had worse problems though since they lack that failsafe. Recently an ASUC B president was disqualified in an election, and then tried to sue their student government court over it before the case was even finalized. The "real" court threw out their case on the grounds that they hadn't yet exhausted the student government legal process, and eventually they were allowed to take office on a technicality ... and then the shadiness began! -- they started trying to get the student government to pay the $22,000 they had incurred in their spurious lawsuit! You can read my coverage of that here (remember to read the entries in order from bottem to top).

Basically, as I said, the secret seems to be getting a lot of people to write letters to the editor to the school paper and especially having as many people as you can show up to the student government meetings in protest.

See also Beetlebeat, a UC Berkeley student government dissident.

[furzicle.livejournal.com]

There is yet ANOTHER bleeding heart sob story in the Register this morning about live removal of bees, done by none other than Angel and Lew West. I think their reporter has a serious hang-up about bee removals!

[emosnail.livejournal.com]

Oh my bean. Angel must be sending the paper a press release every single time she has a call. Maybe I should start sending them daily press releases: "tomorrow Bee Busters employees will be removing at least a dozen bee swarms, colonies, and wasp nests! Every one of which no doubt a human interest story!"