>We have found that hives with less feed are more active and actually
consume more, and hives which are being fed in winter also do more poorly
than one might expect.

Allen, I haven't used scales, but that is also my impression in the Calif
foothills.  The hives heavy with honey and large clusters, just calm way
down and wait until January, when they start gearing up for the early spring
flow.  It appears to me that the colony can "sense" its amount of stores,
and that such feedback changes behavior.

>a secondary effect is that having all that feed settles the bees down to
the point where consumption on a strong hive is only 1/4 lb a day or so.
> I'm at day 74 of this record and the hives on the scale have each consumed
about twenty five pounds of honey.

Wow, that's over 2 lbs per week!  That's almost double the published figures
for Minnesota or for indoor wintering!  They've really got the furnace going
in Alberta!

Jerry wrote:  In MT, he'd argue, you need bees to take advantage of the
spring flow, which comes hard and fast.  Miss that,
and the bee populations peak after the first of the main summer flows,
 never catch up.

Ditto here in Calif.  In my area, the season if over by the end of June, now
that we no longer have yellow star thistle (successful biocontrol).  It
appears to me that the main reason that European bees evolved to store so
much honey was precisely to take advantage of early spring flows by being
able to ramp up the population early, using last year's stores.

Randy Oliver

             ***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software.  For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html

Access BEE-L directly at:
http://community.lsoft.com/scripts/wa-LSOFTDONATIONS.exe?A0=BEE-L