Hello and welcome back to The Bee Vlog
My name is Bill
and today I'm going to be doing an experiment on a couple of my hives
I'll be playing music
But first the results are in from last week's experiment
That's right. I did an experiment on you.
In last week's video I featured some of my figurines
I had a Sauron, a Serenity, and a Bilbo
that I put annotations on, to see if you'd click on them
Sauron got the highest number of clicks, with 17 clicks
Serenity got 12, and Bilbo got 2
So what can I take from this?
Well obviously everyone prefers to click on annotations that start with the letter 'S'. Right?
There's a high correlation between annotations that start with 'S' and people who click on them.
I kid about this but this is something important to keep in mind when doing any kind of data analysis
Repeat after me: "Correlation is not causation"
That means that just because 2 variables correlate, or line up well together
it does not mean that one causes the other
And this comes up over and over and over again whenever we do data analysis on experimentation
or surveys, just because we see some variables correlate does not mean they're related to each other
So in that video last week I asked for some feedback on what classical music I should play for the bees
And we got a tie, the top 2 picks are "The Four Seasons" by Vivaldi
and "Flight of the Bumblebee"
So I'll be playing both of these songs for each of the hives
I like these selections because not only are they great pieces of music
but they line up well with a bee theme
"Four Seasons"...bees...bumblebees...
It all works together and I think some of you were going for that when you made these picks
As part of this experiment I'm also going to be monitoring mite levels
on the hives that I'm going to be playing music for
So I slid a sticky board underneath the hive
and I'm going to be monitoring it over 24 hours
I'll come back tomorrow and remove the sticky board and do a mite count to see if the mite drop
changed due to the music
And there are so many other variables that I can test for, I wish I had 200 hives that I could this with
and test volume, different selections of music, different times of day...
how many times I play the music over each day or each week
There are so many things I can do, I can't fit it all in. This is just a pilot experiment right now
to see what we can learn from doing this
Now bees are very sensitive to vibration, and music and sound is vibration
and even if they don't have ears, they can sense it
So I'm going to be careful about the volume at which I play the music
I'm actually going to be putting my phone up against the hive body
and that hive body will act as a sound board
I don't know if you've ever put your ears down to a table or a floor while playing music
it actually amplifies the sound
So I'm going to turn the music way down low and put it up against the hive and play it for them
I'll first play "The Four Seasons" followed by "Flight of the Bumblebee"
It's about a 13 minute play list
My hypothesis for this experiment is that nothing's going to happen
That the music will have no effect on the mites or the bees
But wouldn't it be really cool if it did?
That's something I like about science, when you're wrong, that's very interesting
It's going to take some time to really compile the results of this experiment
I mean, I can know the mite counts right away
but really what I'm testing for is to see if the bees will survive the winter
and we won't know the results of that until next spring
So stay tuned