With respect to PLB's recent post:

>I would point out that Canada is a highly diverse climate region, as is California. Heather and Gard's work was done at Guelph, in the middle of the Great Lakes Region. This area has a climate more similar to New York State and Michigan than to the midwest and prairie provinces. 

When I was an undergrad, I did a study on butterflies of the SW Yukon. When I tried to get the paper published, I was blasted by one reviewer for splitting species that should have been lumped together and I was blasted by another reviewer for lumping species that should have been split. I was stuck squarely between a lumper and splitter and with no good consensus, my paper ended up not being published. 

Your comment, Peter, reminds me of the old splitters vs lumpers in the species debates. Rather than splitting NA into a myriad of different regions, I would argue Ontario has a similar enough climate to the prairie provinces that research done in Ontario can be roughly applicable, although with a little caution. 

I know there are people who think that basically all areas are unique for beekeeping and there is limited applicability of practices in one area to practices in another area, particularly when it comes to wintering. But I think we should ask ourselves what are biologically relevant differences for the honey bees. 

I was just forwarded an article by someone that suggests Africanized bees have a diminished ability to switch into a long-lived winter bee state (Amdam 2005). We know there is a line in the US that Africanized bees seem reluctant to cross. If this reduced ability to transition to winter bees is what determines their northern limit, maybe this is also the line we can use when we're considering which wintering research is applicable to which areas. 

So rather than splitting North American into a myriad of different regions, perhaps we could lump North America into two broad regions: the region where western honey bees need to use their ability to transition to a winter bee state in order to survive, and the region where they don't. 

I'd be curious what others think. I'm looking for a biological basis for splitting up different areas of NA instead of the commonly used but somewhat arbitrary and potentially biologically irrelevant climate-related bases. 

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