Fellow Bee-L'ers, I have a question?
 
How many different patterns of colors do you find in your hives?
 
I opened a hive that had been vacant since last year.  A feral colony moved
in and set up house keeping in July.  Lucky for me the moths hadn't done
much damage to the comb left by the former residents (pesticide kill)  so
the hive may be OK.   I ask the above question because these bees have many
different patterns of stripes.  Some are the standard 6 striped italians,
some have only very light stripes but the stinger end of the bee is dark
nearly a third up the thorax.  I even have some bees with no noticable
stripes just what at eye site appears to be a yellow bee the drones are
solid dark and about 10% of the workers are solid dark.  The bees seem to
all be getting along.  I remember reading somewhere on the Bee-L that if a
hive is distroyed, or moved, the bees left behind will join a local colony.
Could this bee what happened?  The hive is in an area where a lot of new
construction is going on with clearing of all of the trees for the quarter
mile west of the hive.
 
The girls are doing fine, I treated for mites.  They have about half the
brood box full of honey, pollen and brood.  We haven't had our first freeze
of the year here in South Central Oklahoma, USA.  I will probably feed them
this winter come jan or feb.  I haven't decided if I should requeen because
the hive might be resistant to mites, but the hive is very agressive.
 
Richard Barnes
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