Hi all: 1. Bee escapes are fine, if you have the luxery of waiting for the bees to leave - doesn't work so well when the truck and crew are waiting to pull supers in a yard of 50-100 colonies. 2. Lots of different ways to use blowers -- and yes, we often drop a cover on the ground to catch bees that we knock off frames. 3. Speaking of covers, best idea I found was a combination cover, bottom board, hive stand used by a commercial guy who didn't use pallets. Kept the hives off the ground, and he never had too many bottom boards and not enough covers, etc. as he made splits, etc. 4. Chemicals used to drive bees end up in wax and causing queens to supercede - mainly when overused -- if a little bit works, lets use a lot to speed up the process. 5. Your call as to whether queen supercedure is good in the middle of the main honey flow. To hear some on this list, the replacement queen must be inherently inferior since she developed and mated on her own. Personally, I don't like the unplanned, several week shutdown of brood rearing. But, I'm not convinced that the bees can't do as good a job as a queen grafter. 6. Understanding/mapping the bee genome has merit. What we do with the information has pros and cons. We've already been down the path of "let's create a better bee" using slower and less informed ways of breeding/hybridizing (and I'm not even including genetic tinkering)and sometimes had apparent success -- with problems often popping up later. Disappearing disease in bees, hybrid corn that was so removed from the original gene pool that it lost resistance to some specific diseases. 7. In the race to embrace or stone genome work, maybe we should ask what traits we'd like to see in bees and why. For example, one breeder, who is involved with this work, dreams of improving a bee's memory. Nice idea, but what's the end result? Will that bee better work a new crop, or will it remember one in decline, and continue to work it? For our training of bees to find things, we don't think that we would want to improve their memory -- its just as likely that they will then begin to remember that we often fail to reward them for finding the target of interest. Nor is it likely to be as easy to switch them over to search for something else. At this point, the advantage of working with bees over dogs, is that unlike dogs, the bees are a bit easier to fool. We may not want a smarter bee. 8. Lot's of uncertainties about genome work. The breakthroughs could be great. No doubt, we will accelerate our ability to modify bees and bee behavior. That also means that we will be able to get into trouble faster. 9. I'm always pro new research and technologies that can help the industry, just be careful about what you wish for. Our own work is beginning to show that we don't know nearly as much about bees and bee behavior as we thought -- so we also need to work on a better understanding of the bee itself before we start manipulating its genetics. Cheers Jerry J. Bromenshenk Research Professor The University of Montana-Missoula [log in to unmask] 406-243-5648 406-243-4184 http://www.umt.edu/biology/bees