[ExI] The robot bees are coming

[Dave Sill]

On Tue, Oct 2, 2012 at 9:53 AM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

> Once you get used to having bees around everywhere, you can walk right up
> to a commercial beehive in your street clothes, with no ill effects.  The
> bees will not rush out and sting you.


As a beekeeper I have to add a caveat to this. Once you're comfortable with
bees, and provided you're not allergic to bee stings, you can approach
hives and open them up, take them apart, etc., without a suit. But there
are times when even an experienced beekeeper won't do that--e.g., late
summer when bees are naturally protective of their honey stores. Also,
there's a wide range of aggressiveness from colony to colony--some are like
a Labrador retriever that'll let kids yank it's ears, others will let you
know right off the bat that you're not welcome. And even commercial hives
can get some African blood...making them seriously dangerous even to
experienced keepers without bee allergies. At a minimum, one should always
wear at least a hood and have an epi-pen when working with bees.

As far as robobees are concerned...we're so far from being able to produce
a via bee replacement that it's not even funny. A typical colony has ~50k
bees. And they self reproduce and self fuel.

-Dave
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