Tim Vaughan recently gave some information about beekeeping in his part
of California.  I forgot what part of California he wrote about, but he
said they had had cold weather.

   A week and a half ago we also had cold weather here for several days,
nearly getting down to freezing and only up to about 60 degrees in our yard
here in Santa Barbara.  The last few days, though, have had a reversal,
with temperatures down only to the upper 40s and up to the mid or upper 70s
(F).

   Paul Cronshaw and I worked 14 of his colonies today.  All but one were
doing fine, with nectar (still some eucalyptus) and dark yellow pollen
coming in (likely from black acacia).  The one weak colony had an
apparently new queen, but no brood and too few bees to bother with; so we
united it with another colony. The weather was splendid, and the bees paid
essentially no attention to our manipulations.  We certainly didn't need a
veil!

   As some of you may remember, this is the bee yard where we collected 10
queens last June and shipped them to Jim Tew, Gard Otis, and Zachary Huang
for an experiment they are conducting.  They obtained 10 queens from each
of three geographic locations, where beekeepers had not treated colonies
with anything to control varroa.  They also wanted queens from colonies
that had not become Africanized.  In our case, after removal of queens last
June, we allowed the colonies to undergo supercedure on their own, with
natural mating with whatever drones existed in the area (none from any
managed colonies that we know about).

   All the colonies in that apiary have now gone 4 years without treatment
of any kind (not for varroa, tracheal mites, nosema, AFB, or anything
else).  Furthermore, those bees in some cases survived for several years in
the wild (not escaped swarms from beekeeper hives) before being hived for
this yard.   As we worked through the hives, we saw not a single wrinkled
wing bee.  Nor did we see any varroa mites on the workers.  A set of split
open drone brood in one colony exhibited no varroa mites.  However, the
last colony we opened had a bit of drone brood.  By opening about 25 cells,
we saw two drone pupae with two varroa mites on each and another drone with
a single mite (3 drones out of 25).

                                                                Adrian

Adrian M. Wenner                    (805) 963-8508 (home phone)
967 Garcia Road                     (805) 893-8062  (UCSB FAX)
Santa Barbara, CA  93106  [http://www.beesource.com/pov/wenner/index.htm]

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*
*    "We not only believe what we see:
*  to some extent we see what we believe."
*
*                           Richard Gregory (1970)
*
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