> Pete, I understand your skepticism, but I find it hard not to observe the resurgence of ferals in many areas

I am not skeptical about survivor bees, I wrote about this in the Bee Journal five years ago. My neighbor, Tom Seeley is studying them at present. What I am skeptical about is the potential to gain information from people who don't keep track of what they do and tend to spin it in an overly favorable light. 

I have collected feral colonies myself for years and watched them succumb to the same problems as the store bought bees. There is a dynamic that is being missed here, due to lack of understanding what are the actual factors at work. In other words, some folks are keen on placing the credit on their management when the real cause may be isolation or some other thing.

But finally, it is not a simple matter of collecting anecdotes and stringing them together like pearls of wisdom. Tom is doing the hard work of collecting samples and having them genotyped, trying to establish what distinguishes so-called survivor bees.

PLB

             ***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software.  For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html

Guidelines for posting to BEE-L can be found at:
http://honeybeeworld.com/bee-l/guidelines.htm