> 1.  A super full of straw...
> 2.  Follower boards...
> 3.  Bottom supering...
> 4.  Slatted Racks...
> 5.  'Cedar' wood...

But can you "cedar" connection here?

The connection is that all of the above can be accurately
described by even the most cynical beekeeper as at least
"can't hurt".

As long as a management practice does not actually kill the
bees over the short term, there is sure to be someone who
will advocate it as the "silver bullet" that, by inductive
logic, MUST be the reason for their success.

The good news is that bees are not only tolerant of, but can
often thrive in the face of not just neglect, but outright
abuse.  If bees were less adaptive and robust creatures, more
beekeepers would learn about and use "statistical confidence"
more often.

But I must admit that I do not know of any specific
rigorous studies that have proven that any of the above
do NOT have any positive effect on harvest, colony survival,
etc, and there is at least one study underway now that
is said to have collected data that might provide support for
the use of follower boards, at least in winter (Robert Madsen,
of Chief Dull Knife College as mentioned very recently here on Bee-L).

If you want to see at how far down the garden path a bright
person might be led towards making "the error of causality",
one need only consider the experiences of anyone who started
keeping bees in the mid-Atlantic states in 2000.  Three solid
years of severe drought, followed by last year, where spring
brought so much rain that many hives were starving in June,
and summer brought only more rain.

These folks cannot be blamed for having "learned" how to keep
bees under conditions that everyone with longer experience
would consider "extreme".  What "worked" for them in 2000 - 2003
would have been anything but "optimal" in 2004, and none of these
years will be a basis for success this year, assuming that we will
be "back to normal precipitation".  Regardless of how "good" their
data and statistics might be, their entire data sample is not just
skewed, it is completely warped.

Long ago, I played tennis every week with a statistician - when she
told me I was only average, she was just being mean.  :)


                        jim

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