The impact of brood pheromone has been known for a long
time, the trick in this product was packaging - how to
keep the volatiles from volatizing off too quickly.

A few thoughts about this "performance enhancing drug":


It will be interesting to see how the product sells
to beekeepers, who are, ummm... ahhh... paid per hive.  

Ooops.  Did anyone think this one through clearly?
Can anyone in beekeeping ever be accused of "marketing"?

With the product, one could expect to see a the same
job done by less hives, on the same planting.  Sounds
this product might prompt some reconsideration and
renegotiation of the whole fee structure thingy.

So, I'd say that the actual "market" for this product
would be the grower, rather than the beekeeper.

Beekeepers should be on the lookout for reduced
counts in requests from growers, or increased acres
without an increase in hive count.  For all you
know, the grower might sneak some of this "bee speed"
into your hives when your back is turned.  

Gedankenexperiment time:

If you are putting your bees on multiple crops, each 
in succession, the first crop may be better pollinated,
but if bees are foraging earlier when under the
influence of excessive brood pheromone, doesn't 
this imply that there will be fewer (surviving)
foragers for subsequent crops?  Its a jungle out
there, and casualty rates among foragers are 
not so good many times.  One has to wonder if
the queen could "keep up" with this for long,
or if the hive will loose population as a result.

And at some point, all that extra pollen that the bees 
are collecting to feed all that imaginary brood...
goes where, exactly?  Well, it clogs up the brood frames,
doesn't it?  Welcome to pollen-bound operations.
At some point, where does the queen lay?  I'm not sure 
what one does with pollen-clogged frames when every
hive has them.

And pollen has a odor, perhaps even a named pheromone.  
Anyone know for sure?  I'm way out of date in this area.
At some point, wouldn't enough pollen accumulate that 
the brood pheromone would no longer prompt excessive 
collection?  

One thing that I've seen over and over is that queenless
colonies seem to pack in the pollen like no tomorrow.
I've often wondered about taking a small split (including
queen) out of a colony before deploying for pollination
as a way of leveraging this queenless behavior, but then 
I got real about the labor required for doing it.

Seems easier to just give each hive what it needs to be 
the biggest, baddest hive it can be, and stay out of
trying to trick them into collecting more pollen, when
what is wanted is not "collection" but inadvertent
spreading of pollen by pollen and nectar foragers.

But for a pollen-trap equipped hive... I'm tempted.

******************************************************
* Full guidelines for BEE-L posting are at:          *
* http://www.honeybeeworld.com/bee-l/guidelines.htm  *
******************************************************