[ExI] i'll bee seeing you... was: RE: old software fun

[spike]

From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of spike



 

>…I am waaaay not hip on how to do image recognition with a cell phone camera.  It would be crazy cool if we could figure out a way to do it, but I am not there yet, and don’t expect to arrive there in the next few weeks, oy vey.  spike

 

 

 

Back when we still had the online bee group a few years ago, it occurred to me even then that what we were doing was better than nothing, but not a lot better.  We had no numbers and no standardized measurements, just all talk.  If we had some way to create a standard meter-stick, then we could create plots, such as bee count on 1 May of each year, then plot of bee count on the vertical and year on the horizontal, then extrapolate forward, like this:

 



 

 

Then the farmer could create a plot of crop production as a function of bee count, which would enable her to estimate what it is worth to get some hives and populate them, or what happens if she does nothing, etc.

 

There is a reason why I am kinda obsessing about all this, not just because I love bees (I do, but that’s not it.)  I remember working the bees as a teenager back in the 70s (yes, dammit the NINETEEN 70s (I wasn’t even born yet in the 1870s.))  I remember how the bees would swarm all to hell.  Our bee truck was yellow, but sometimes they would swarm all over the side of it until it was uniformly brown.  It was still the right shape, so we knew there was a truck in that pile of bugs somewhere, but you really needed to look just to find the door handles, and even then, when we went to lunch at Taco Bell, they wouldn’t let us go in the drive-thru, made us park over across US1 in an empty lot and brought us our food, because there were so many bees still hanging around, they didn’t want them scaring away customers.

 

A couple years ago I went  and visited a local apiary and was struck by how sluggish and sparse were the bees.  It was nothing like the wild bug-fest I recall from my cheerfully misspent youth, just nothing like it.  The contrast was striking; it was the public library compared to a Brazilian street festival.  This just has to be a bad thing.  It would be nice to have some actual numbers rather than my descriptions.  We have numbers for honey production, and numbers of active hives, but we do not have good numbers on the activity per hive.  The numbers talk.  They would tell a tale if we had them right now.

 

spike

 

 

 

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