(Jerry and Randy both describe how bees drift freely between hives, over considerable distances)

This is new info to most beekeepers I talk to, and underscores the imperative of ethical beekeeping practices: the communal stomach reaches across the landscape. If you want to run experiments involving bee diseases or pests, you need to do that outside the flight range of other beekeeper's bees. Or at least compensate them for any problems caused by the experiments.

I believe Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada beekeepers are finding it impossible to maintain their mite free status thanks to the drift off trucks carrying mobile bee stocks. There is not an alternate route: if I were a Thunder Bay beekeeper I would run with robbing screens on.

Dr. Kirsty Stainton of the UK states that in several studies on drift, it was found that between 10-40% of the bees in any given hive were not "born" there. They are drift bees.

A club member who put a package of black Russian bees into his apiary of 6 hives of Italian bees found the populations mixed in all colonies within a week. As with Jerry's chalked bees, this is only observable if the bees look different.

My own EFB epidemics in spring coincide with the arrival of pollination bees in the local blueberries. It makes sense that these bees, plonked down in a strange location, and in a field with little forage they like, range far and wide a) because they are lost in the new landscape and b) because they are hungry and looking for any forage and better forage. Tummies full, they likely return to the first hive they encounter, which also explains the phenomenon of bee gain for hives on the end of rows.

That other bees fly home to my apiary would be fine except that they are carrying foulbrood and mite loads....so in spring I will put robbing screens on early.

Perhaps bees in the wild were spread thinly enough on the landscape that they did not have to develop fine tuned "what is my home" skills.? They were oriented to their nest, the nest was not moved, and it would be unusual to encounter another hive nearby.

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