Personally I would like to see more people chip in with their experience.  I do serious pigeon genetics breeding studies as a hobby.  I am working on much harder problems in pigeons than anyone has ever before given a serious try.  I take nice fancy birds people  have spent a life time developing and turn them into ferals by the time I am done.  Those people that made the fancy birds know little or no genetics.  But, I value those people beyond belief.  More often than not they have anecdotal observations that tell me the first tests I should do.  And without them I would not have the fancy bird to start with.

The same is true of bees.  Anecdotal stuff can give us ideas on new things to try.  Maybe it works and maybe it fails.  Either way it advances knowledge.  Currently there are several threads on another forum about knocking down varroa in the fall with brood in the hive.  One guy has knocked down about 20,000 varroa in one single hive!  He has treated with OVA now seven or eight times and is still getting a big fall each treatment.  I am amazed the hive was even alive with this many varroa.  But, equally important it shows that when brood is present it can take a lot of OVA treatments and a lot of time to catch those suckers outside the brood so OVA can whack them.  Does this mean OVA is an ineffective treatment when there is a bunch of brood and some other treatment should be picked?  The best way to learn about such issues is if people tell all of us such anecdotal observations that seem strange when they see them happen.  If they just lurk how do the rest of us learn of such problems?

Adam said "content gets lost in the exchange" with no quote at all.

I can understand too much quoting may not be helpful.  But, some context is important.  Responding to a two day old post with no quote at all can make it hard for me to figure out the context of the response and put that response in perspective.  I feel some quotes are important to simply "set the scene" and get my mind aimed at the topic and allow me to remember history.

Dick
" Any discovery made by the human mind can be explained in its essentials to the curious learner."  Professor Benjamin Schumacher talking about teaching quantum mechanics to non scientists.   "For every complex problem there is a solution which is simple, neat and wrong."  H. L. Mencken

             ***********************************************
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