Hi Bill

 > It seems more likely that cell size changed because of the race of
 > bee rather than an attempt to build a bigger bee.

There have been attempts in UK to build bigger AMM bees, Beowulf Cooper 
established that AMM was in fact very adjustable in body size and could 
be 'trained' to use cells as small as 4.7 mm and as large as 5.9 mm.

Over a roughly forty year period many colonies were 'upsized' and some 
today live quite happily on 5.9 mm combs (with an apparent reduced 
varroa load).

The number of colonies involved in these trials has been quite large and 
even in areas where the trials stopped twenty years ago, there are still 
many instances of large bees and large cell sized combs.

There are many beekeepers that took part in these trials that are alive 
today and many of them are convinced that the enlarged bees were capable 
of gathering larger crops, however I have never seen adequate evidence 
of this alongside control comparison colonies that were not upsized.

I did make some experiments involving shaking some large sized bees onto 
smaller foundation (5.0 mm - 5.1 mm) about two thirds of those colonies 
responded by reducing in size although many took three regression 
attempts to achieve it, but there was a portion of the total that 
stubbornly refused to go below a cell size of 5.6 mm.


Regards & Best 73s, Dave Cushman, G8MZY
http://website.lineone.net/~dave.cushman or http://www.dave-cushman.net
Short FallBack M/c, Build 6.02/3.1 (stable)

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