> Peter Borst quotes Joe Traynor, paraphrasing Peter Borst, thereby presenting his own paraphrasing of the apocryphal tales of beekeepers of yore

Evidently you have not read the actual piece, presented at the ABF Conference in Anaheim and subsequently published in the ABJ. My primary source was:

G. H. Cale. He was an editor of the American Bee Journal for many decades and had a long career which included many aspects of commercial beekeeping and research. Gladstone Hume Cale was born in 1890 in Rochester, NY. He had been employed by the Maryland College of Agriculture, and was on the staff with Dr. E. F. Phillips at the U. S. Department of Agriculture. He joined the company of Dadant & Sons in 1921, where he was put in charge of all work in the Dadant apiaries, about 800 colonies. He was added to the American Bee Journal as their Experimental Apiarist. G. H. Cale wrote a popular monthly page called “All Around the Bee Yard.” 

In 1944, he wrote:

> From our own experience we find thirty-five out of one hundred hives are empty each spring from all causes and must be replaced one way or another.

You can say what you want about me, but the opinions of G. H. Cale and Joe Traynor are widely respected. 

PLB

             ***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software.  For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html