A cousin of mine said he’s ordering a pound of bees this spring. So? If you put them in a box and put the box on the scales, what happens if some of them are flying around?
I don’t know for sure, but I imagine that you could freeze them for a couple of minutes to knock them out, and then bag them and weigh them. This works for ants, I don’t know if it works for bees also.
My WAG is that for each size of bee they know how many are in a pound. So you want a pound of 1/4" (or however they’re measured), that’s 1150 bees. Here ya go.
Also, if they are in something airtight it should matter if they are flying or not, IIRC.
The weight would fluctuate extremely minutely as the wings moved up and down, but the average weight would stay the same. At any rate, there would be no appreciable difference in weight for what I assume to be normal tolerance variations for weighing bees by the pound.
Smash 100 bees. Weigh the goo. Divide by 100. Now you have the average weight for one bee. From there you can figure out how many bees are in a pound.
How to assure that you have the right number of bees in the package is an exercise left to the reader.
Why on earth would you put living insects in an airtight container to ship them?
You mean “shouldn’t matter”, I’m sure.
Everyone’s been trying to make this point, but let’s be explicit about it: A box with a flying bee in it weighs, on average, as much as one with a non-flying bee in it; when you fly, your wings push down air, which pushes down on the bottom of the box. Of course, sometimes your wings are pushing up air as well; the key is that, in order to stay at one position, on average, the downward force generated must equal your weight. (If you are rising, then then the downward force generated will be greater than your weight; if you are falling, then it will be less)
It doesn’t really have to be hermetically airtight, in practical terms. This is a variation on the old canaries in a truck puzzle - that they’re flying inside the container does not remove them from the system being weighed.
That they’re moving about during the process of measurement will make momentary differences, but that’s a different facet of the problem - in fact, the same problem would occur if you tried to weigh a step ladder with a person on it, while that person kept ascending and descending the ladder.
Movement makes the momentary measured weight fluctuate, but being suspended inside the system doesn’t remove the object from it.
The box must be closed enough that no significant amount of the wind caused by the bees’ wings escapes it.
I know that beekeepers use smoke to stun bees and make them much more docile.
Not to ship them, just to weigh them. As others have said, I suspect you’d only have to weigh them a few times. It’d be kind of like shotgun guages, where the number was originally determined by how many lead balls of that diameter it took to make a pound, but now they just know what that diameter is.
Suppose it’s pierced around the middle with a row of little ventilation holes (obviously each too small to let a bee escape). In the event that an air current from a bee’s wing happens to emerge through the hole, it’s not going to preserve much of its force vector - it will come out as a dissipated cone-shaped puff, which might give the box a tiny lateral net push, but it’s not going to make a big difference, in practical terms.
Once the box starts resembling something more like a cage, then yes, the bees can start to get cut off a bit from the system when airborne.
If you are doing it without gloves, very carefully!
Hmm. Hmm. Very interesting. Thanks. But now I’ve got to thinking about something else… If you’re going to toss (or herd or whatever) a bunch of bees into a box, wouldn’t they all have to be blood relatives (or at least very good friends), so that they wouldn’t start stinging each other? And, if that’s the case, what happens if you ask for a pound of bees and there’s only 12 ounces of the same family available? Do they mix and match and let you deal with the consequences?
I’ve never bought bees, but one time I did buy an order of ladybugs. They came in a small drawstring burlap bag, inside a loosely-sealed box, all at a temperature a bit above freezing. They were tightly enough packed in the bag that they didn’t really have enough room to fly, anyway. The instructions said that I could keep them in the refrigerator for up to a few days before releasing them into my garden. (Amusingly, I found them on a Google search for mail-order suppliers anywhere in the country, but the first hit turned out to be just across town.)
Bees aren’t going to be flying around inside a box much, anyhow. They’ll tend to crawl around on the sides, instead.
My grand-grandma was a beekeeper, so as a kid I’ve seen how it’s done. First, you do it early in the morning, when it’s cold. Second, you stun them with smoke. By then, they are mostly crawling slowly around, forming kind of mass of bees. You can just scoop them gently into bag. You want to weight them? Hang the bag on the scale. Nothing easier.
I know how you weigh cetaceans.
To pick even smaller nits: only acceleration/deceleration matters - unaccelerated movement will not affect the indicated weight.
But where do you go to weigh a pie?
Somewhere over the rainbow