inside the chamber through the chamber wall into the exterior wooden runway. Because of the small diameter of the tubes, chosen to minimize microwave leakage from the chambers, cardboard partitions (13 cm long) were placed in the runways at an angle to guide bees into either an exit tube or an entrance tube to prevent crowding that would have occurred if bees had been required to enter and exit through the same tube. A second runway (58 x 13 x 2.54 cm) (Fig. 1, B), with sides and bottom constructed of wood and the top covered with glass, extended from the exterior chamber wall through the exterior wall of the laboratory. The following parameters of colony biology were compared in the sham and treatment colonies: [1] flight and pollen foraging activity, [2] maintenance of internal brood nest temperature, [3] brood rearing activity, [4] distribution pattern of brood and food in cells within the combs, [5] changes in colony weight, and [6] adult population at the end of the 28 day exposure period. Nine days before microwave exposure was initiated, each hive was stocked with ~ 2000 worker bees, randomly sampled from a common hive 10 km from the laboratory, and placed onto 3 comb frames (1 honey, 1 with 1-day-old eggs, and 1 of 14-day-old capped brood). A laying queen also was introduced into each colony. To reduce genetic variation as much as possible, the introduced queens, as well as the queen that produced the brood and bees used for stocking the colonies, were all reared from eggs laid by the same queen mother.
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