JD>From: John Day <[log in to unmask]>
  >To: Multiple recipients of list BEE-L <[log in to unmask]>
  >Date:         Thu, 11 Apr 1996 09:11:26 -0700
  >Subject:      Re: CORDOVAN
 
JD>lots of talk lately about cordovan bees.  other than the obvious color
  >differences, are there any other reasons why one would want them?
 
JD>more honey, gentler, disease resistant, talk in 3 languages, etc?
 
Hi John,
 
NO, in my experience they are not any more productive, and could be
less in some cases. Pure Cordovan colored bee's are attractive in
display hives, on white combs, and are lot's of fun to spot out in the
field on the flowers. A Cordovan worker full of nectar is a splendid
sight with natural background light they "appear" several sizes bigger
then regular workers and are very translucent, almost red colored. A
real nectar tanker..
 
Drone eye colors come in many different colors. Laidlaw at UC Davis had
a lot of fun with these genetic variabilities, and several of the queen
breeder's in the Davis area sold queens with a small percentage of these
drone's in their commercial stock. One queen breeder in Arizona, Jim
Smith, also used some of the Laidlaw stock and we always's had a few
queens from him that produced drones with different eye colors. Several
of the colors can be found naturally from time to time in ordinary
stock.
 
I also found another mutation that was interesting for awhile. All
the drones were hairless. I thought for a time I had a new stain of
a virus that also causes worker bee's to lose or eat the hair off of
each other, but in this case it was a genetic thing as I watched the
drones hatch out and they were born with no hair, all looked like old
worn out drones from day one.
 
A question that really has not been answered about eye colors is are
the drone's blind and what other traits do they have or not have. I
investigated this in my own hives and found that the light colored to
yellow eyed drones do not seem to drift from hive to hive. So it could
be that once they leave they are lost or just really good at finding
their way back to the right hive. I suspect they are lost and fly
until they find a queen or run out of gas. The darker colors seem to
drift from hive to hive and because they are more common in natural
stock, I would suspect they can navigate as well as any drone and are
more successful in mating and more common to find in x number of hives.
We also have had worker bees with drone size eyes that were not
easy to tell what cast they were on first blush. Also have seen a
hive that produced workers in the drone brood.
 
  In the olden days of portable honey houses we uncapped with a steam
heated knife. The uncapper had the job of killing the drone brood, which
was just something to brake up the boredom of the uncapping job. One
day I uncapped several drone combs of sealed brood, and was I surprised
to find that they were not drones but normal worker brood. Some will
wonder why would you find brood in the honey house, but in the days of
portable extractors we would move from yard to yard and most of our
hives at the time here in Central California were kept crowded down in
doubles. Maybe it was something left over from the comb honey days I
don't know, or maybe it was because we had so much equipment tied up
in swarms, or could be from moving bee's by hand you were not looking
to load a lot of tall hives by yourself. Take your pick, anyway we
would extract all the honey out of the supers that at times had a few
patches of sealed brood, maybe 5-10%. We would uncap the honey cells
around the brood and extract the honey. Then we would put the brood
back on the smaller hives. This was one way of keeping the hives equal
in strength and worked well as we did well averaging 100# of honey
over 20 years and sometimes averaging 60# per extracting. Good money
at ten cents a pound, except for the best water white sage which brought
in a premium price of fifteen cents a pound. We all could live well
and buy new pick me up trucks every year.
 
All this is pure observation and not based on research, but I am sure
much work has been done on the subject.
 
                                ttul, OLd Drone
 
 
(c) Permission is granted to freely copy this document
in any form, or to print for any use.
 
(w)Opinions are not necessarily facts. Use at own risk.
 
---
 ~ QMPro 1.53 ~ ... The bee, dost thou forget?