Having another blog for tech stuff is just fine, but I say ignore them about the focus of this one.
I think all your posts have a enough of a link to bees.
I first got interested in beekeeping after reading a article that showed up on slashdot about swarm decision making and using its ideas for robotics. That lead to lots of reading about bees and eventually getting into beekeeping. They are just too interesting. :)
I liked your post "Beekeeping and the Hive Mind".
This is a relevant article I sent out via our newsletter. Thought you might be interested. (If you are interested in signing up for our newsletter, please visit The Bee Folks at
www.beefolks.com).
BEE DANCE COMPUTER ALGORITH USED TO INCREASE BUSINESS EFFICIENCY
This was an interesting article in one of my trade mags. Would you
believe, there is a new prediction model based on the waggle dance
of honeybees?
When a foraging honeybee finds a nectar source and returns to the
hive, they dance in a figure 8. The direction of the movement
indicates the direction of the source with relation to the sun, the
distance over which the bee waggles her tail indicates how far to
travel, and the ferocity with which she waggles her tail indicates
how plentiful the nectar source is.
Hence, the name "Waggle Dance".
Different foragers may hit different nectar sources. As the
foragers perform their dances, the hive collectively decides how
many bees to send to each source.
That is exactly what this computer model does! The program was
developed by a team of researchers at Cardiff University's
Manufacturing Engineering Centre. The program can be setup to
calculate the results of thousands of different settings on a
manufacturing process. The program is designed to send more
computing power to tweak the most successful settings.
So far, it has proven itself with up to 3,000 variables, and can be
used on all or part of a company, or even just a single machine.
So far, it has been used to work out the most efficient settings on
welding systems, and for the design of springs.
Who would have thought a single honeybee could affect an entire
manufacturing process!
Anyhoo, I'm refocusing: this blog focuses on backyard beekeeping: adventures, triumphs, losses and the occasional heart-warming homily. I'm moving the tech-talk of the last couple of articles over to the Waggleverse, the blog I share with Waggle Labs consultants Peter Brown and Shelly Farnham (also an OG Hive Mind bee...the waggle in Waggle Labs is no coincidence).
I think all your posts have a enough of a link to bees.
I first got interested in beekeeping after reading a article that showed up on slashdot about swarm decision making and using its ideas for robotics. That lead to lots of reading about bees and eventually getting into beekeeping. They are just too interesting. :)
I liked your post "Beekeeping and the Hive Mind".