Thanks Pete, have you read all three of their papers on the study?  It
details how much pollen was coming into the "restricted" hives, as well as
how much beebread was present.  The nurses never felt any restriction on
food supply.

>It seems to me that if the trigger was known, hives could be influenced to
produce more long lived bees in fall and have better winter survival.

We Calif beekeepers are well aware of this, and feed pollen sub to realize
that goal.
Re the trigger for the initiation of the diutinus bees in fall, the
evidence to date suggests that it is the cessation of fresh pollen coming
into the hive (as opposed to stores of beebread), which then causes the
nurses to stop rearing brood (and perhaps restrict the amount of jelly that
they give to the queen).  The subsequent lack of young brood producing
young brood pheromone then triggers the last emerging workers to shift to
diutinus physiology (I wrote about this recently in ABJ).

-- 
Randy Oliver
Grass Valley, CA
www.ScientificBeekeeping.com

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