Randy>But on the other hand, Italian colonies
(with which I have experience) are happy engaging in massive broodrearing
when they are living hand to mouth, and can starve in a few days if the
weather turns. <




I agree that Italians like to brood, but maybe not about their lack of response to limited resources.  I've published about a study where our control sites were on alfalfa fields, away from the sites we used to assess pollution exposure and coliony responses.




For our short seasons and the push we make for our experiments, I prefer Italians so that they build fast.




In the pollution study, colonies nearest the copper smelter showed impacts on brood area, population size, brood and adult bee mortality.  But our distant control sites had sudden brood losses.  It was a dry year, and in mid-summer, the irrigation district shut off the water to the alfalfa growers.  That affected the alfalfa bloom, and that in turn caused the Italian colonies to canabalize brood and to conserve food resources (we were measuring areas of nectar and honey, brood, and counting frames covered by bees.




Whether another race of bees might have slowed down egg-laying or cannabalized eggs and larvae sooner is unknow, but the colonies were effectively reducing the food resource consumption in response to the dearth of food.  They were not starving, but they really changed behavior when the alfalfa blossom failed.




Jerry



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