>As we have repeatedly discovered, trying to advise beginners by email is a
largely fool's errand.

No kidding!  Let me give you an example from this fall.

I had a beginner who sounded knowledgeable call me.  He said that he had one
queenless colony and one strong colony and wanted to know what to do.

I was in a rush, and told him to feed them sugar syrup so that they wouldn't
fight, and then to put the queenless box directly on top of the queenright
colony to combine them.

He called back the next day upset because there were so many dead bees and
fighting, and he had gotten stung up!

Incredulous, I asked him for details, I realized that I had assumed too
much!

The "queenless" colony turned out to be 10-frames strong, but he couldn't
find a queen (I had assumed that he was speaking of a weak colony about to
die out).

He thought that when I said to put the queenless box on top that I meant to
shake all 10 frames of bees onto the top bars of the other colony ( I had
assumed that he understood how to simply put one box of bees on top of
another).

And by "feeding syrup" he thought that I meant to douse the whole fighting
lot with syrup! (I had envisioned a top feeding of syrup in advance).

I felt awful that I had not spent longer on the phone with him, but there
are simply not enough hours in the day for me to do so.

So yes, Allen, it can be a challenge to dispense long distance advice, and
even harder by email where it might take ten messages to even get the basic
details!

Randy Oliver

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