<and good reason for not doing breeding practices contrary to nature!!! and
working with local feral stock for buiding up an outfit>

I work with any feral stock I can find (I like free bees afterall), but as
I live in an agricultural area with a fair amount of commercial beekeeping
and pollination much of the feral stock here is swarmed off from all over
the country.  There's nothing I can do about that except move and that
surely isn't going to happen since bees are my hobby not my living.

I tried going completely treatment free, I build all my own woodenware and
use foundationless frames mostly because I enjoy wood working.  If I put
nothing in the hive myself I still can't keep hives chemical free where I
live because they pick it up all around me.  I got tired of all my bees
dying and I think my wife was getting a little annoyed at all the money I
kept spending without much to show for it (even building your own stuff
it's amazing how much you can spend when there's nothing coming back in).

<If you are studying the effect of cell size,...; you are
comparing combinations.>

<I love when people try to argue with success.>
Bob I didn't take the statement as arguing with success. The statement was
trying to determine what factors have led to success.  Even if it is
multiple factors that should also be something that can be clearly
demonstrated, though not without time and cost.  I believe what was meant
by the statement is that if small cell truly is a key factor you should be
able to take the same bees with the same management in the same location
and put part of them on small cell and part not.  If the small cell bees
outperform the non small cell then I'd say yep that's an important factor.
If they both do well or the non-small cell bees do better then nope.  If
they both fail you might have screwed up.

I haven't heard anyone argue that Dee is not successful.  The goal is to
understand why.  If you don't understand why it's not likely that you can
apply it to different situations and control for those differences.  It's
not possible for me to apply everything that Dee proposes to my situation
without changing some aspects because I have a different environment.  I
can't keep chemicals out of my hive even if I don't put any in myself.  I
don't have barrels of honey that I can feed to my bees if I run into a
dearth like last summer.  You can argue that I'm keeping the wrong kind of
bees that aren't adapted to my area, but surrounded by ag and commercial
operations the ferals aren't likely to be a whole lot different.

Now if I understood more of the why of successful treatment free operations
I might be able to apply them to my situation to be successful.  If the
reason ferals are better is because they shut down brood rearing, or use
fewer stores, or whatever I can try to do that myself.  Some of those are
qualities that Russians are supposed to have, maybe splitting or requeening
would be enough of a break, I just don't know without trying and learning.

Jeremy
West Michigan

             ***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software.  For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html

Guidelines for posting to BEE-L can be found at:
http://honeybeeworld.com/bee-l/guidelines.htm