Hi All

Peter said...
> The use of the word strategy here is extremely tenuous.

I hold my hand up for a poor choice of words :-)
Shall we say instead... a method of ultimate survival that can help in 
extreme cases.

I use the word extreme, because it is rare, let us borrow Occam's razor 
from Chris for a moment and consider a few possibilities...

Dee states...
 > Certainly the queen isn't running back and forth
 > between the top and bottom part of the unlimited broodnest?

Murray says...
Why not

Occam says that Murray is right in all but about one percent of cases.

In that odd one percent of hives, Mike Stoops comment about mother and 
daughter queen would make sense.

But of that one percent, perhaps one in a hundred cases is due to 
anarchistic bees (something like one chance in 10,000).

Now I do not know a figure for the frequency of Thelytoky among 
anarchistic bees, but for the sake of this explanation let us use the 
figure one in a hundred again (I reckon that is a reasonable choice, 
given the frequency of the other behaviours) this would take our chance 
of thelytoky being the cause to about one in a million.

So for every million cases of brood found in a position that might not 
be contiguous with other brood, we have 999,900 cases where that brood 
is due to a queen.


Regards & Best 73s, Dave Cushman, G8MZY
http://website.lineone.net/~dave.cushman or http://www.dave-cushman.net
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