Dave Green wrote:

>     I am already working on [recording Andy's contributions]. I have been
>>pulling together everything I can find, to edit and put together a book
>of >"Andyisms."

   Here's my two cents worth (perhaps not worth much more, as Andy might
have said).

   Andy was an independent thinker, rivalled by few.  Actually, most good
beekeepers I know are independent thinkers and also bright.  The difference
is that Andy did not hesitate to openly call a spade a spade as he saw it.
He was one of the few, for instance, to provide the public support our
group has needed.

   In particular, as all might appreciate, I especially savored the
following comments by Andy:

********

"Anytime anything is posted that brings a response from Dr. Adrian Wenner,
its worth the read, both posts of course. Adrian reminds me mostly of Dr.
John Eckert, who I was fortunate to have spent many late night hours talking
bees in his later years. Both men have the same eye for bees that I like to
think I have....

"Anyway Dr. Wenner, like Dr. Eckert and a few others from the past are able
to see these things, the same things that we beekeepers see and explain
them so that even I can almost understand them. Are they always right, NO,
but all have one thing in common, an open mind."

*********

   I knew John Eckert well, a friend of our extensive beekeeping family,
for decades and considered him the ultimate gentleman scientist.
Understandably, I am pleased to be placed in the same class by someone as
astute as Andy.

   No, I never met Andy but wish I had.  Perhaps his one utterance that has
stayed in my mind more than anything else was his reference to all too many
of those engaged in bee science --- "B.S." --- as he put it.  He knew that
we actually still know very little about bee biology; that notion seems to
escape many of those in bee science, who seem more content to live with
dogma from the past.

   May Andy, wherever he is, be able to practice beekeeping as we knew it
in the late 1930s (before pesticides, mites, etc.).

                                                           Adrian



Adrian M. Wenner                    (805) 963-8508 (home phone)
967 Garcia Road                     (805) 893-8062  (UCSB FAX)
Santa Barbara, CA  93103

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*     "Nature only answers rightly when she is rightly questioned."

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*                                                      Goethe
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