James suggested:
> What about absconding from varroa riddled colonies, with a dwindled
> workforce?

Would they abscond as a swarm, or just disperse?  Could these just be mating
swarms where queens are superseding?

Bob wrote:

> A little talked about ( and I have NEVER seen in print) reason for spread
> of
> varroa is the absconding of workers from a heavily varroa infested hive.

This was certainly printed in leaflets issued by our National Bee Unit (NBU)
in 1996 and probably before that.

> My experiments with II queens and then finding workers of another race
> making up a third of the workers (at times) show without a doubt drifting
> of
> workers between hives is far more common than our beekeeping literature
> would have us believe.

I recall that the NBU (then located in Stratford-upon-Avon) did some
experiments on drifting as part of their work on the likely spread of varroa
(probably in the early 1990's).  They marked worker bees and then looked for
them in their other apiaries around the district.  I do not have any data
but, from conversations with NBU staff at the time, I remember that it was
shown that worker bees drifted into apiaries some distance (> 1 mile) away.
I wonder if any other research has been done on this - certainly easy to do.

> It is my opinion (and might cause a roar as not the opinion of most
> beekeeping authors) that in most hives the guard bees do not do a very
> good
> job of stopping worker drifters at the entrance.

Does this not depend on two things:
1 Whether the 'drifter' comes bearing gifts and
2 The current state of the flow - guards are always more vigilant  when a
flow ends.

> Drifting drones is the method of varroa spread in the apiary other than
> robbing they tell us! I would change the statement to drifting drones AND
> WORKERS in the apiary with many hives.

This must be correct.

Peter Edwards
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