Hi Allen


That leaves everyone wondering if you normally find as much
as 18 hives, which would be two percent, and if this year
is, therefore, abnormally low?


Reply:
Prior to shaking down to 4.9mm top tolerance from 5.0mm -
5.1mm sizing we were then regressing to we would find even
more then 18 hives in our outfit that fluxated between
900-1100 colonies. We lived with the mites but the foul was
driving us crazy pulling, processing, and retooling and
splitting/requeening constantly. It was the foul of the
secondary diseases that made us shakedown a second time to
the 4.9mm top tolerance sizing, meaning no bigger then
4.9mm until stabilized to see if we could whip the
secondary diseases. We had at this time stopped using TM
paddies and had switched to propolis patties due to data we
had pulled up in looking thru paperwork written, not liking
the TM residues (they say it degredates but it is only in
sunshine and not internally in hives we found out reading
deeply.).

Anyway, when we got on the 4.9mm our foul problems started
dropping fast and by 3-4 years in were down to very low
levels of less then about 10-12 hives, and then kept
getting lower each year until the past 3 years or so we
haven't found over 1-2 in anyone year that I have had to
pull frames from and add clean drawnout combs.

By the way, for the record, we don't burn our foul frames,
we melt them down, reprocess the wax with our own wax
melter to old written standards, and then with foundation
embossing machine we make our own foundation and redo our
woodenware.

Sincerely,

Dee A. Lusby
Small Cell Commercial Beekeeper
Moyza, Arizona
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/organicbeekeepers/




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