Bill,

>From the thread, and other reading, this is a summary:

It appears that Cape Bees do fine in an all Cape Bee hive.  If they go
queenless, a number of workers will lay fertile eggs and a queen will be
raised (rather than all drones in a "normal" laying worker hive), as the
strong pheromones of the queen are absent and the nurse bees recognize the
need for a new queen.  Here, I would assume the laying workers are not
active for long periods, just till that new queen is raised and starts
laying, which would then stop the laying workers from increasing in numbers.
Even if the  old laying workers continued, this would just boost the numbers
of normal workers available, so long as only a few of them were present.

However, Cape workers in a non-Cape hive will start laying fertile eggs
while the queen is still present. These become more Cape workers, of which
many start laying, until there are a great many of them doing so, eventually
resulting in the old queen being balled as defective.  In the meantime,
there are increasing numbers of laying workers and eventually all Cape Bee
clones in the hive.  For some (possibly unknown?) reason, no new queen is
ever raised, even when all the bees, including nurse bees, are Cape Bee
clones (possibly due to the large number of laying workers at this point?).
Some where in this process, some or all of the Cape workers abscond and move
into other hives, to start the process over.

If someone has the answer as to why Cape psuedo-clones are raised as queens
only in hives that started as an all Cape Bee hive, but never in hives that
start out as another race (scutellata in SA), that would be enlightening.

Karen

-----Original Message-----
From: Bill Truesdell

.. If the Cape Bee is not self sustaining how is there a Cape Bee? It seems
to do fine on the Cape. Beyond that, there are problems but with mixing with
other bees North of the Cape.