> Why the heck would you think the city is a good
> platform when a tiny portion of hives are city located,  
> your exposed to a wider array of contaminats and less 
> good forage than most hives?

Because of the near impossibility of successful supersedure, combined with
the existence of benign conditions that make urban hives the ultimate
"control colonies".

There is no "wider array of contaminants" in areas where there is no
agricultural or garden pesticide use, such as "the City". (Tiny bit of
jingoism crept in there, as NYC is "the city" and all other cities are not.)
Even the golf courses in this area have gone organic, as the hipsters have
been very annoying, so the pesticide use has dropped to nearly zero.  So,
the larger the city, and the more parks, trees, and hipsters in that city,
the more one can be assured of low-to-zero pesticide or herbicide residues.
The environmental quality improvements that have been made since the 1970s
have cleaned up the air and water no end.  Most of this is due to the
low-sulfur rules for diesel fuel, and NYC's adopting of an
"ultra-low-sulfur" rule.

There are occasional cases where the bees can get into something
unappetizing, such as sno-cone juice, but these tend to be self-correcting
problems, as the humans complain about the enthusiastic bees, and food
coloring is an easy thing to spot. One hive that was established within
flight range of weeds growing on a superfund site ended up with
greenish-blue honey from the magnesium and aluminum in the nectar.  There
are some places, like superfund sites, where one does not want to keep bees.

If you doubt this, send samples of your bees, honey, and brood comb down to
the USDA AMS food testing lab in Gastonia NC, and ask them to run a full
test for the hundreds of contaminants they can detect.  We can then compare
lab reports.  We did so to localize the source of a small bee kill a few
years ago, and those not in close range to the use of undiluted imidacloprid
concentrate to ground-drench some prized late-blooming roses had no
contaminant residues beyond the usual residues one would see from varroa
treatments, for those beekeepers who used commercial miticides. 

As far as "less good forage", NYC recently planted its one millionth tree.
Not all of them are basswood or other nectar-producing trees, but a goodly
number of them are, and one city beekeeper posted a photo to our local
facebook page showing that her joy at the start of the basswood bloom was
tempered by the realization that she'd have to wash all the nectar off her
car, as she had parked under a basswood street tree.  Further still, when
plants stop blooming at the Central Park Conservatory Garden, trained
professionals in snazzy jumpsuits emerge from trucks in the late afternoon
to replace the wilted blooms with some different plant that is blooming,
straight from the city's greenhouses.  The bees must love this smorgasbord.
Over in Williamsburg, a section of Brooklyn, the beekeepers call this
effect, diven by landscaping companies keeping decorative gardens blooming
for apartment buildings "SmorgasBurg".   There's also a growing trend toward
installing green roofs.  Forage is not a problem.

The wide range of rural and suburban contaminants have been studied in
projects such as this one.  (The Chemlawn man is the suburban beekeeper's
worst nightmare, as he sprays clovers and dandelions in bloom, and is
somehow permitted to do so.)

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2016/160531/ncomms11629/full/ncomms11629.html
http://tinyurl.com/gqdwd2t

             ***********************************************
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