Another guessing game here in electronic diagnosis, a world away.

Overall I find Dave’s observations salient, especially if you run with
upper entrance holes or cracks.  Sometimes, it is hard to tell when to
close upper entrances or cracks [to cut down the draft, and not to vent]
at the onset of winter, not knowing all the conditions of each hive that
might be conducive to robbing, such as weakened by mites or queen-loss or
whatever.  Certainly, the presence of wax debris, as others have already
noted, invariably under the screened bottom, is a sure sign.  I have been
feeding three September swarms but having been robbed, they are hopeless
so that I am not even thinking about combining them, though still spoon-
feeding.

Though unproven, I have long suspected two observable phenomena in
robbing: 1) a docile colony, regardless its strength, may be subject to
robbing by super-mean [like feral] marauders, and 2) in the frenzy of
robbing, the bees under attack *seem* to join the robbers, as well,
perhaps realizing the hopelessness of the situation, a possible
explanation as to why there were not as many dead bees as they should have
been in this case.  The latter could possibly be a topic for someone’s
Master's thesis or even a dissertation topic, judiciously blown-up.


Yoon

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