Lawnwork and Google Earth

This weekend was beautiful. The temperature was somewhere between 40 and 45 and the came out for about half of the day. With the change in the weather and the arrival of the bees in a couple of weeks Leah, Michael and I worked in the backyard raking leaves and figuring out where we are going to put the vegetable gardens and flowers. This past week I have ordered the last of the parts for the hives, Michael got the parts to the hive stands and we both finished prepping the location so that it would be reading for the deer fencing that we will be constructing to protect the bees from the dogs and the kids.

Using Google Earth, I’ve started to create a little survey of some of the local nectar resources that the bees will have access to. I am a little hesitant to publish an GIS overlay of the resources because of privacy concerns but I’ll think about it. Near my house is a huge apple orchard that is also near organic or uses very little pesticides. This area will clearly be the main source of nectar for the hives. In addition, there are tons of open fields. The hive also benefits from a source of water just ten yards away from the little zerglings. It is just a matter of years before we will be able to outfit bees with very small GPS receivers and will then plot their movements over the landscape. The range of a foraging bee is about 3 miles according to Winston in his book The Biology of Bees p.179. (Winston gets his information from Seeley in Honeybee Ecology, 1985.) The area that I live, while in suburbia, has avoided some of the worst of land development and ecological denigration. So there are plenty of resources for the bees to use.