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"research has shown that sterilizing old beehive frames with gamma rays before reusing them cuts down the risk of colony collapse" Where would a beekeeper gain
by pfaux 18y ago
"research has shown that sterilizing old beehive frames with gamma rays before reusing them cuts down the risk of colony collapse"
Where would a beekeeper gain access to a gamma source?
- randallsquared 18y agoHospitals, lacking some industrial use I'm unaware of.
- Tichy 18y agoMaybe at the beekeeper's store? (I don't know, just guessing).
- mechanical_fish 18y agoYep. Why not? Or someone will go into business as a door-to-door gamma irradiation service: The truck with the lead-lined box arrives at the appointed time, you hand them the frames along with $x per frame, they irradiate them for you and hand them back. If it's more efficient to truck the frames to the source... well, that works too. A lot of these industrial beekeepers routinely truck entire flatbeds full of hundreds and hundreds of beehives to farms around the country. Occasional stops at the cities where the hive irradiators are available might not be such a big deal.
- jimbokun 18y agoBut doesn't this introduce this risk of a nerdy teenager being stung by one of these irradiated bees and manifesting all the traits of a bee, except magnified to human scale?
- ars 18y agoThey could use bleach. It's just research showing that sterilizing the frame helps, you don't have to use actual gamma rays.
- tdedecko 18y agoI talked to a bee keeper the other day about CCD. Apparently, they have facilities that you can bring the hive to that will take care of killing the colony. They then use gamma rays to "clean" the hive. I didn't ask where these locations were. I assumed they must have been associated with the nearby university.