I had an occasion to complete a questionnaire from the Bee Informed Partnership a few months ago basically asking how many hives I had at the beginning of the season and how many I had at the end of winter, as I had lost 4 out of 40 hives,I therefore had a loss of 10% which is quite reasonable as far as losses go. However after thinking on the matter a while I contacted Bee Informed and mentioned that their questionnaire had not taken into account the 20 or so increases that I had made in the spring and had passed onto new beekeepers thereby turning the 10% loss into a  20% increase, so any information gleaned from the questionnaire was not valid.  When the final questionnaire came out in April I was glad to see that colony increases were now taken into account. So after the worst winter that I have experienced in the 22 years that I have been in America and have heard of high losses from many areas, perhaps the lower losses for the 2013-2014 season could be due to the increases being added to the equation.
             ***********************************************
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