The following was edited to remove quotes of the entire previous message and taglines.
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There was work done at Craibstone (the Beekeeping Unit of the North of
Scotland College of Agriculture) to determing the optimum size of winter
cluster. They discovered that too big was almost as bad as too small. They
used thermocouples to observe winter temperatures and came to the conslusion
that the Queens were pushed into laying up a small nest to create water.

I am saying the above on the basis of conversations with Bernard Mobus who
was the last Beekeeping Advisor at the college and I cannot say with
accuracy whether their results were published or not. The work would have
been done in the 1970's I think.

Regards

Pete Watt

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