EL>Interesting stuff! While generally, I concur: EL>Unscientifically, I've observed that sometimes the opposite can happen. On >early or cool mornings colonies can seem to "still be drinking their >morning coffee" when a visit, even with smoke, can arose the field troops >and kick-off the days activities. There can be a clear increase of >activity after a visit. EL>regards, Ed Ed, I am with you and am NOT knocking anyone's BS, but I have never seen the negative results of smoking on working bees that others report. I did know one beekeeper who got his daily working orders from a higher authority then most and he would on certain days work his bees with out any kind of smoke because of his beliefs. I also know that on these days he and his son took a real beating from the bees. I suspect that these tests are not reflecting any more then the regional observations that may vary radically from one area to another. Like the spraying of aggressive bees with water in the low humidity of the southwest which I would not be surprised has little or no calming effect on the bees in the humid south. Here in California we have flows, both honey and pollen that for sure if you pull into an apiary during a corn pollen flow the bees will drop the heavy greasy loads of corn pollen and it will fall like rain. But enough gets in to make NO difference in the nutrition of the hive or the amount collected in pollen traps. We have another flow from the fall tarweed that is common in the lower elevations of both the Costal foothills and Sierra mountain foothills. There is no doubt that if you pull into a yard when this flow is on ALL bee activity in the yard will stop. I have parked a half mile away and tried to sneak up on the bees to have a peek and by the time you open a few hives the yard will go deathly silent. I am sure this is the bees response to the aromatics released by the plants by just the normal activity of crushing a few plants under foot. What happens to the bees in the field is a mystery, but do doubt as soon as the air clears which may take a hour or two the bees return. Hives in this kind of flow are notorious drifters and robbers and they will clean out any failing hive before the beekeeper finds the problem I believe this is because of the masking of the hive odor by this very aromatic plant. Yes, it does smell like dog du du some say, and I have been run out of the local beekeepers favorite coffee shop in town several times because of the rank odor of this plant that will cover your pant legs with its sticky resin within the first few feet of tramping through it. The honey mellows out with time and if not drummed up for a few days. The bees also can make a good crop of honey from the stinking tarweed, several times I have extracted 100# per hive from this source alone, but must admit the honey is about the same quality as dandelion, yellow, and it will get hard in a few cool days. The pollen from this plant is also very low in bee nutrition and the bees will store up huge amounts because they can't consume it as fast as they bring it in, and in fact will cut way down on brood before the flow is over if this is the only source of pollen they will stop all broodrearing. Heavy mysterious losses are sometimes reported from bees pastured in fall tarweed and some in BS have named it 'fall decline or fall collapse and much effort has been made to find a cause other then poor nutrition and the fact that even in California tired old worn out bees do not winter well even in our mild winters. On the other end of the scale is the early summer sage flow along the central coast of California. The first experience I had with coverall's is in this flow when we used coverall's because of the wet foggy weather normal along the south cost which would soak us to the skin and take some of the pleasure out of beekeeping. The bees would fly out of the fog to get to the sage and coming back fully loaded with nectar they would drift onto our backs in numbers large enough that they would dry large areas on our backs from the heat they picked up a mile or two away working the sage which was outside of the fog and 70 to 80 degrees. Our activity did not stop them from flying nor did the wet fog, and we extracted huge crops at one time measured in case's per hive. (A case is wooden shipping container that held two sixty pound cans of honey and was used in the days when California honey was mostly shipped east by rail. It was one unit of measurement that I was sorry to see go out of use just about the time I got into the bees on my own and honey crops took a dramatic fall from 200# or more per hive to 60# or even the 30# crop that is considered good by some pollinators today.) It was so wet on those sage locations from the fog that the power lines would spark and pop and big clouds of bees were attracted to that activity and would ball the insulators, and balls of them would fall to the ground and you sure did not want to be directly under them when they fell, maybe the Ozone got to them. Last, in the old days I worked in a portable extracting house, actually outside most of the time. We pulled the portable which was built on the back of a Morland Truck into the bee yards which were 96+ hives arranged on each side of the truck in three or four rows deep. Within a few minutes the bee activity would get back to normal after pulling the big old honey house into the bee yard. I remember one flow that we averaged 60# per double hive in the tank by the end of the day. We extracted the supers and also removed any heavy honey from the bottoms and equalized all the hives as we went along. By the time we got to the end of the rows and finished that afternoon I went back to check the first hives and sometimes they would be FULL of nectar from top to bottom, so I am sure no matter what the beekeeping activity the beekeeper is doing if there is a good honey flow the bees can get back to normal within a few minutes of the end of that beekeeping activity. I am also sure that if there is no real bee activity in the field a few puffs of smoke will cause all activity to stop and it will be slow to start again. Beekeepers who operate in the hotter regions of the desert southwest ware they must keep their bees under shades or have them melt down or see the field bees die landing on the hot earth can with no problem give a yard a few puffs of smoke in the hot afternoon and load them on a truck and move them without leaving a bee. IMHO, the 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 ~ L'ENFUMOIR" is the tool the beekeeper uses to smoke bees.