JD>From: John Day <[log in to unmask]> >To: Multiple recipients of list BEE-L <[log in to unmask]> >Date: Thu, 11 Apr 1996 09:11:26 -0700 >Subject: Re: CORDOVAN JD>lots of talk lately about cordovan bees. other than the obvious color >differences, are there any other reasons why one would want them? JD>more honey, gentler, disease resistant, talk in 3 languages, etc? Hi John, NO, in my experience they are not any more productive, and could be less in some cases. Pure Cordovan colored bee's are attractive in display hives, on white combs, and are lot's of fun to spot out in the field on the flowers. A Cordovan worker full of nectar is a splendid sight with natural background light they "appear" several sizes bigger then regular workers and are very translucent, almost red colored. A real nectar tanker.. Drone eye colors come in many different colors. Laidlaw at UC Davis had a lot of fun with these genetic variabilities, and several of the queen breeder's in the Davis area sold queens with a small percentage of these drone's in their commercial stock. One queen breeder in Arizona, Jim Smith, also used some of the Laidlaw stock and we always's had a few queens from him that produced drones with different eye colors. Several of the colors can be found naturally from time to time in ordinary stock. I also found another mutation that was interesting for awhile. All the drones were hairless. I thought for a time I had a new stain of a virus that also causes worker bee's to lose or eat the hair off of each other, but in this case it was a genetic thing as I watched the drones hatch out and they were born with no hair, all looked like old worn out drones from day one. A question that really has not been answered about eye colors is are the drone's blind and what other traits do they have or not have. I investigated this in my own hives and found that the light colored to yellow eyed drones do not seem to drift from hive to hive. So it could be that once they leave they are lost or just really good at finding their way back to the right hive. I suspect they are lost and fly until they find a queen or run out of gas. The darker colors seem to drift from hive to hive and because they are more common in natural stock, I would suspect they can navigate as well as any drone and are more successful in mating and more common to find in x number of hives. We also have had worker bees with drone size eyes that were not easy to tell what cast they were on first blush. Also have seen a hive that produced workers in the drone brood. In the olden days of portable honey houses we uncapped with a steam heated knife. The uncapper had the job of killing the drone brood, which was just something to brake up the boredom of the uncapping job. One day I uncapped several drone combs of sealed brood, and was I surprised to find that they were not drones but normal worker brood. Some will wonder why would you find brood in the honey house, but in the days of portable extractors we would move from yard to yard and most of our hives at the time here in Central California were kept crowded down in doubles. Maybe it was something left over from the comb honey days I don't know, or maybe it was because we had so much equipment tied up in swarms, or could be from moving bee's by hand you were not looking to load a lot of tall hives by yourself. Take your pick, anyway we would extract all the honey out of the supers that at times had a few patches of sealed brood, maybe 5-10%. We would uncap the honey cells around the brood and extract the honey. Then we would put the brood back on the smaller hives. This was one way of keeping the hives equal in strength and worked well as we did well averaging 100# of honey over 20 years and sometimes averaging 60# per extracting. Good money at ten cents a pound, except for the best water white sage which brought in a premium price of fifteen cents a pound. We all could live well and buy new pick me up trucks every year. All this is pure observation and not based on research, but I am sure much work has been done on the subject. ttul, OLd Drone (c) Permission is granted to freely copy this document in any form, or to print for any use. (w)Opinions are not necessarily facts. Use at own risk. --- ~ QMPro 1.53 ~ ... The bee, dost thou forget?