Bees

A view of part of one of the rose gardens. The bees, however, were much more interested in the blue stuff, bottom left.

Sitting idly in the sun, I speculated about a project for a sound engineer: make a high fidelity sound recording of the rose garden for an hour or so, using more than one microphone if that takes your fancy.

The challenge is then to use that recording to count the number of bees present at some sensibly chosen point in time.

The thought being that given that the beating of one bee's wings is not synchronised one with that of another, cunning analysis should be able to sort out the sound signal from one bee from that from another, and so, by extension you should be able to count the number of bees.

What is the upper limit on the number of bees you can count in this way?

But remember the dictum from Sellar & Yeatman: do not write on more than one side of the paper at once.

PS: do school children still read Sellar & Yeatman or has it been turned into a Disney animation which they watch instead?

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