Bob wrote:
>I see thelytoky as a curious and rare happening  but of little use to me and the methods I use to keep bees and produce honey.


Interestingly, all discussions on this point back to Otto Mackensen's experiments in 1943. Normally, a principle is not accepted in science unless it is independently verified, at least several times. It appears likely, if not certain, that occasionally a queenless colony of bees, having developed laying workers, will spontaneously produce a new queen from an unfertilized egg. How often, no one really knows. I have combed the books to find any corroboration of this phenomenon and have come to one simple conclusion: nobody really cares. As Bob says: it's a rare and curious thing but of little use.

Allen refers to a let-alone plan of beekeeping which would lean heavily on bees taking care of things like queenlessness on their own. I submit there are better ways to do this, having practiced such a system for many years. I came to the conclusion that one could simply allow queenless hives to fizzle out, take 25% loss as a normal thing and simply make 30 to 50% increase in the spring. I think you would get just as much honey as you would by closely monitoring the hive, you would effectively control swarming, and you would have great success introducing new queens since they are more readily accepted by splits than by full colonies.

This is, in fact, a system practiced by many commercial beekeepers in California, and no doubt, elsewhere. I worked with an old school beekeeper who simply divided every decent hive in the spring, in anticipation of expected loss. If you rely on a summer or fall flow, there is plenty of time for splits to build up in time for the flow. Furthermore, small hives seem very determined to build up, hence the build-up rate overall probably exceeds that off normal full sized colonies. A plan very similar to this was anticipated by Langstroth as soon as his frames gave complete control over the honey bee colony.

pb