Thank you all. To Arron's point, I can't rule out two-legged critters, as I'm only looking at the results, but I haven't had anything like that on my place, so I'll doubt it. As per Mike's point, yes, I'm not more than 10 miles NE of Bodega Bay, well within the range. Interesting that I've been keeping bees here for 14 years and this is the first, it took them quite a while to find me! I'll drop by the hardware tomorrow for ground rods and move my electric fence around my hives. By the way, after my post I found some big scat close to the hives. If anybody can recognize bear scat from photos, take a look at: http://www.sonic.net/~gkendall/scat/ Greg Kendall [log in to unmask] Pilot, beekeeper, packet hacker, gentleman rancher. El rancho del gato muerto 38 24 28 N 122 58 29 W *********************************************** The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html Guidelines for posting to BEE-L can be found at: http://honeybeeworld.com/bee-l/guidelines.htm