I appreciated your taking the time to find the information and to post it to BEE-L Generally, when material is being cited from the www, BEE-L guidelines request simply giving URLs rather than cut-and-paste entire texts, since the text is available from the original site and not all members will want to receive or read the bulk of the material. This may be something we need to reconsider, though since websites change and some things like this are nice to have in the archives. > http://netcall.com.mx/abejas/en/history.htm > http://ag.arizona.edu/pubs/insects/ahb/inf1.html One thing I noticed is that, although you usually cite authors, the two sites given here appear to be anonymous. That is a shame, since we have no way of knowing whether the work there is researched or simply a regurgitation of the same old sources. Historical information is often hard to interpret, since one author will quote or paraphrase (or even interpret) another and so on and so on, resulting in what appears to be numerous distinct sources being, in fact, only one source. It is possible, even likely, that you are right, but there is always the chance that there is some unreported information, or that such terms as 'common bees' in one of the articles has a meaning other than what we understand. In reading the accounts from the past, we must always make assumptions --and we all know about assumptions. It is always fun to speculate as long as we recognise that we are speculating, and as long as we wait for good proof before believing too strongly the products of our own speculation. Thanks for keeping us thinking. allen