wedrifid comments on Open Thread: July 2010 - Less Wrong

6 Post author: komponisto 01 July 2010 09:20PM

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Comment author: wedrifid 03 July 2010 12:59:36PM *  0 points [-]

I'll presume you aren't making a joke since you used the lesswrong keyword 'confused'.

What do bees eat?

Comment author: gwern 03 July 2010 09:55:23PM 0 points [-]

What do bees eat?

Flower nectar, I had always thought. I did think to myself, 'maybe what is meant is honey harvested from bees feed exclusively on the flowers of tea trees', but leaving aside my similar difficulty with the term 'tea tree' and how one would arrange that (giant sealed greenhouses of tea trees and bee hives?), I couldn't seem to find anything in a quick Google to confirm or deny this - 'tea tree honey' is a pretty rare term and mostly got me useless commercial hits.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 04 July 2010 04:32:06AM *  0 points [-]

The link I gave said "manuka" rather than "tea tree." If you want to know how beekeepers control the inputs, the term is monofloral honey. This is quite common, though a higher price for medical grade honey might lead to more involved methods.

Comment author: wedrifid 04 July 2010 02:43:35AM *  0 points [-]

Put the box in the middle of a large forest of tea trees and kill any other plant that bears flowers nearby. Bees are quite efficient optimisers, they'll take low hanging fruit tree blossom if it is available.