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Trouble getting it up...
If you've read my previous post on my wind experiment, and if you haven't you should, it's pretty good, you will remember that the maximum wind speed we used was 3m/s. The annual average wind speed in the UK is about 4.3m/s, which is quite a bit higher than our maximum. How the Met office obtain their wind speed data is by using weather stations erected 10m in the air in areas where there are no buildings or vegetation to block the wind.
Now even if you don't know that much about bees, I'm sure you will know they don't often fly 10m into the air. They spend most of their time either foraging within plant patches and vegetation, or flying between patches and to and from the hive. In these cases they generally fly at about 2m, and vegetation level (which obviously varies depending on plant species) is roughly around half a meter off the ground. Both of these heights are quite a bit lower than 10m.
So what is the point of all this rambling? WELL, our plan was to see what wind speeds bees actually experience while foraging, and comparing these to what the wind is at 10m to try and demonstrate that even though the average wind speed in the UK is 4.3m/s, the average wind for a bee is less.
First step
Weather stations
The first step was to get the actual devices that would be able to record the wind speeds for me. Enter, THE WEATHER STATION, well actually weather stationS, four in total
Now that we had the weather stations, we now needed a 10m pole to attach them to. This was the tricky part.
The pole
Now finding a 10m pole might have been possible, however that wasn't the issue. Moving a 10m pole to the field where we wanted to place it, that was an issue. So we opted (by we I mean our AMAZING technician Luciano, who basically did all the work for this as I have no clue about anything DIY) to screw together large planks of wood and assemble our own 10m pole. So a trip to B&Q later (well, several trips as things were obviously forgotten) we have our rather lovely wood and can begin assembly.
The assembly process was drilling the wood together (with plenty of screws) and attaching the weather stations to the pole using jubilee clips. The weather stations were placed at 10m, 5m, 2m, and 0.6m (vegetation height).
Once all that was done and everything was secured, we had our pole with weather stations attached! Again, that wasn't to difficult, however the fun was only just about to start with the task of...
ERECTING THE POLE
(had to be done)
For this part we knew we needed more help. Through much begging and generally making people feel sorry for me I managed to get a team of 8 people. It sounded simple enough, put some sturdy pegs in the ground, attach rope to pole and pegs, get people to pull said rope and VOILA erected pole.
This is what we tried. We got so close. Yet so far... About 3/4 of the way up, all was looking good, excitement was rising, champagne was about to be popped and then. SNAP, the top half of our 'sturdy' wooden pole snapped and fell dangerously close to a colleagues head (don't worry a full risk assessment was completed, nothing could actually go wrong).
All is not lost however, as the remaining half of the pole with the lower three weather stations was able to be erected and is still standing strong, surviving the dreaded beast from the east.
So it wasn't a waste of three days work right? RIGHT?
What now?
Well we still don't have any 10m measurements, which was kind of the point so the saga continues. We are currently contacting building suppliers and tracking down a replacement aluminum pole, which we are hoping won't snap. So stay tuned in to find out what happens!