>>They die. Wax moth cleans up the remains. Therefor it is hard to 
observe something that is not there. Habeas corpus.****

Well, Bill, it's not quite that simple.  At a minimum, I'd like to 
observe them in the dying process in nature before they get wiped 
out.  It should be possible at least every once in a while, right?  

Now you may argue that I only get called to thriving colonies because 
collapsing colonies are a lesser nuisance.  A feral colony with AFB 
in August should still have a large enough workforce to be a nuisance 
to a homeowner though. 

>>I run into people who point out colonies that have existed for many 
years in trees. If they did, they would be the holy grail that we 
search for, but they never are.

Are you saying a feral colony can't survive on its own for several 
years in this day and age?  I don't think you can come up with the 
evidence, pro or con.  I am only going by the observations of the 
homeowners.  If an observant homeowner tells me he's observed bees, 
with pollen on their legs, coming into a hole in his house every 
April (about a month before the start of our swarming season) and 
through the rest of the season, it suggests to a continually occupied 
cavity.

[Yes, there are some homeowners who are curious about nature and not 
afraid to approach a bee's entrance hole.  I had one person say he 
did not mind having the bees but his roofer was scared to death of 
them and the repairs had to be done.]

Of course, this is NOT the case with EVERY feral colony but it is a 
case with a lot of colonies.

>>There may be studies on the stability of feral colonies in the 
wild, but it would be difficult to control the primary variable of 
beekeeper's colonies in the area that replenish the feral population.

You'd just have to come up with a method of tracking the queen, and 
her supercedure descendants, in a feral colony for several years.  
The nature of natural cavities and comb do not make this easy.  
Sounds like a great research project to me.

>>You could lose every feral colony every year but replenish it 
with "kept" bees every year so it would look like you had a stable 
feral population.

You are assuming the local beekeepers are carrying strong colonies 
into the next spring and that they swarm. :)  In my neck of the 
woods, the number of beekeepers has been decreasing disappointedly 
fast.

>>The feral bees did die off, as our Pumpkin growers here in Maine 
found out.

There is no question the feral population has shrunk in many areas of 
the country with the introduction of the mites.  I don't know if they 
are springing back everywhere but I did get a record number of calls 
from Nassau County on Long Island last summer where beekeeping has 
been outlawed for decades.  I know of 2 beekeepers in Nassau and both 
of them are 10-15 miles away from the area where I received most 
calls.

Of course, there may be some beekeepers there under the radar.  I 
don't know for sure.  What I do know is that my purchased Italian and 
NWC colonies would succumb to varroa within a year to a point of 
being way understrength for the winter.  Since I started raising 
queens from collected feral queens, they do much better.  Perhaps I 
raise better queens but it's the stock that determines resistance to 
varroa.

BTW, to me, a feral colony, is any colony NOT taken directly from a 
managed hive.  They can be long-term established colonies or colonies 
started from recent beekeeper swarms.  I don't have a way of 
distinguishing between the two - although the color of the collected 
colonies is often a shade different from what I've seen, it's not a 
reliable indicator - and, in fact, the origin does not matter to me.  
All I am looking for is stock that does well left to its own 
devices.  

Waldemar

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