On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 8:37 PM, James Fischer  wrote:

>
> If the rationale is "because of drift", there are a number of studies that
> show that bees would only rarely drift to the adjacent hives, here's the
> oldest and most concise


> "The drifting of honey-bees"
> The Journal of Agricultural Science / Volume 51 / Issue 03 / December 1958,
> pp 294-306
>  J. B. Free
>

Thanks for the post which I found thought provoking.
This study is of drifting in a yard.  That is a different case than removal
of a hive during flying conditions.  The reason that I do the practice of
adjacent hive treating is because logistics dictates that we cannot go back
to yards to remove a hive at night and so we have removed it at a bad
time.  But I decided to do this independently.  I do not know if it is
widespread practice.  And I do not know if it is appropriate (might
reconsider based on the answer to the question below).  However, the above
study is not concerning hive removal.  It says itself in the first line of
the abstract that most of the drift in a regular yard is of young orienting
bees, not returning foragers.


> http://www.ibra.org.uk/articles/Drifting-honey-bees-and-spread-of-AFB
>
> Now this study *may* be pertinent, but it is unclear from the abstract.
The second trial is NOT pertinent to daytime hive removal, it just studies
drifting between pairs.  In the first trial it says:
" Any heavily infected colonies « 50 larvae with clinical symptoms) were
removed from the trial. Only 2 of the control colonies developed AFB."
If you have access to the full article could you comment on whether the
heavily infected colonies were removed in the daytime, and also give the
number of removed colonies (it was 2 out of how many?)


> I submit for consideration that the AFB vectors are hive-to-hive movement
> of
> frames/gear with spores, and robbing, not drifting.
>

With that I wholeheartedly agree.
Stan

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