>Dee said,

>seeing small after swarms go into
>queenless colonies is nothing new.


Some years ago, we submitted a short paper to ABJ.  It wasn't published,
reasons unknown.

An undergraduate student heard me talking about a MT beekeeper meeting at
which the beekeepers were discussing what happens to bees lost from a truck
(migratory beekeeper) -- specifically an un-netted load.  Would the bees
the blow off the load or wander out during refueling, etc. just linger
about and die?

Answer, using marked bees dumped out along a road about 1000 ft from a
commercial bee yard was clear.  The 'lost' bees found the beeyard almost
faster than the student could drive over.  Marked bees landed and entered
colonies.  Later in the day, he photographed marked bees attending the queen!

We repeated this three times, over three years.  Bees coming from downwind
of the apiary get there faster, and more of the marked bees find the
'target' yard.  Bees from upwind also find the yard, but take longer, and
fewer show up -- so some must wander off.  Interestingly, when bees were
dropped at all four compass directions, some showed up from all directions
-- and then entered the same colonies -- which might be on the edge of the
apiary, but were often in the middle.

In other words, these intruders picked a small subset of the colonies --
and bees from all four directions entered these same colonies -- it wasn't
a matter of going into edge colonies from the nearest approach
direction.  Either these 'receiver' colonies were less aggressive about
fending of the newcomers or these queens were pumping out more pheromone or
some other factor that we couldn't measure.

jerry

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