> Just as if there is a memory function within the colony despite the 
> continual changing of worker bees through the season.

I tend to believe this.  There are many potential means of transmission of 
history info, including the way stores or wax are arranged, chemical traces, 
etc.  That is one reason that I do not subscribe to management methods which 
cause many small disruptions to the hives or scrape frames much.

There are many, many ways to encode information into everyday things that we 
take for granted.  For example, the layout if our roads and buildings 
transmit lessons from the past and somewhat constrain our present, as do 
designs of buildings and the format of household items and tools we use.

I can recall when we thought that a memory chip larger than 64 K would be 
impossible due to random effects and cosmic rays interference.  I have a 
little card here that holds 8 GB!.

If I put it into a beehive, I am quite sure the bees could not read the 
information on it.  They lack the mechanism and the 'Rosetta Stone' to 
decode it, even if that information were interesting and meaningful to them.

Conversely, I am quite confident that most beekeepers cannot read the info 
that is abundantly and obviously encoded into a beehive, although some seem 
to be able to pick up a hint.

> Allen, if you ever stop splitting ;-) and take a crop, you might see some 
> difference between wood and plastic hives.

Very unscientifically, I have noticed my tallest hives seem to be the styro 
hives, and when I pulled 23 of the top boxes around the yard the other day, 
only two were light.  The light ones were not from the styro hives.

My friends, the Meijer brothers, are now running 1200 of their 5000 hives in 
singles, using styro boxes.  We talked about that idea often, and they are 
now doing it.  These hives winter outdoors in singles.  The only interesting 
modification in that they added a 2" rim below the box to allow deadroom 
under the standard frames in winter.  In summer the bees build drone comb 
down there which they leave, since bees need drone comb, and the bottom of 
the frame is a good place for it.  Drone comb trappers could just cut this 
off periodically.  They don't.  I have a picture at the top of the Oct diary 
page. http://www.honeybeeworld.com/diary/ .

I had better stop writing a go pull some more supers.  We had cold 
weather -- minus ten C -- and today is going to be warm.  Early morning 
should be a perfect time to take some boxes without having to chase bees 
out. 

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