Keith Malone said: > Small cell, The Lusbys and several beekeepers in the USA and > Europe have done just as you have suggested above using small cells. Done what? While the approach is claimed to eliminate the need for chemicals, I've yet to see anyone present any records to show that: a) They have used no chemicals b) Their colony losses have been minimal c) They have produced reasonable marketable crops, or pollinated But since the process of "downsizing" takes time, I will be more patient. > Though their hard work and results are negated. What results? "Small cell" has been claimed to possibly be the solution to nearly every beekeeping problem known, but tangible results have not been forthcoming. (Again, it takes time, so we must wait...) > When is a caring and honest researcher going to research small cell > methods correctly and completely? "Caring" and "Honest"? As if researchers are neither? [Allow me a moment to change the setting on my Palm Pilot from "Stun" to "Puree"...] :) A "caring and honest" researcher has better avenues of inquiry to explore. He/she HONESTLY considers what is known about "small cell", and CARES enough to not waste time and money that could be better used to examine something else that stands a chance of yielding some tangible results of value. Research exists, but it appears that the research done to date has not supported the claims made for "small cell". It would be a very unfortunate mistake to think that the researchers who do this work are neither "caring" nor "honest". I know of the following: 1) Message, D and L.S. Goncalves. 1995. "Effect of the size of worker brood cells of Africanised honey bees on infestation and reproduction of the ectoparasitic mite Varroa jacobsoni Oud". Apidologie 26:381-386 2) The book "Mites of the Honey Bee" by Webster & Delaplane quotes a study by Ramon & Van Laere discussed in the book "Asian Apiculture" by Wicwas Press, and says: "The smaller cells of AHB, along with the fact these bees have fewer mites than European bees within the same setting has led to the conclusion that possibly a small cell size would limit mite reproduction. Just the opposite seems to be true. Larger cells have fewer mites." 3) An April 2001 progress report "Can the Reduction of Cell Size Reduce the Impact of Varroa?, Sustainable Farming Quarterly Progress Report, HortResearch Client Report No: 2001/291" by M.A. Taylor and R.M Goodwin was quoted on Bee-L here: http://listserv.albany.edu:8080/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0107D&L=bee-l&P=R1042&D=0&H=0&O=T&T=1 There appears to have been no further reports from this study, so I have sent an e-mail to Dr. Goodwin asking about the status of the project. I suspect that things went very badly, and the project was abandoned, but I'll let him tell us. (More later) > Really there has been no great strides made in the transportation industry > in the past one hundred years. Nothing has changed in our modes of > transporting goods around the world, we only use boats, trains, trucks, and > planes. EVERYTHING has changed in transportation. The past 30 years alone have seen increases in both the speed and the volume of international shipments at a rate that can only be described as exponential. Go to an airport and count the planes coming and going. Go to a seaport and TRY to count the multi-mode containers coming and going. Realize that I got a package just this Monday from Hong Kong that they did not ship until Saturday afternoon their time. My wife baked bread for her brother in October, and sent it to him in Sardinia. It arrived fresh. I can click a little icon on my Palm Pilot, and a window will pop up showing me the status of UPS and Fed-X shipments sent from here or destined to arrive here. Most of the status updates are only hours old, and the reports track every single package, planet-wide. (In contrast, I still can't find the keys to a 1964 MGB that a friend asked me to give a new clutch...) > It's really only been in the last three or four decades that this spread of pest > and disease has occurred in honey bees. There is a direct and tangible cause-and-effect link between the increase in the number of international shipments of bulk commodities (where the little beasties can hide), the speed with which these shipments are delivered (which means that the beasties arrive alive), and the appearance of invasive exotic pests and diseases planet-wide. > Nothing has changed in our modes of transportation's in > the past one hundred years, See above. To repeat, everything has changed. > so maybe something has changed in the industry of beekeeping? > Worker cell size has changed in the beekeeping industry in the > past one hundred years. There is no support for this claim. In fact, bees allowed to build comb on "strips" or on non-embossed wax sheets have shown no general tendency to build smaller cell sizes, and even feral hives have not been shown to have smaller cell sizes. The only bees shown to build smaller cells are different, smaller bees, such as AHB, and bees that are "forced" into smaller cell sizes. Yes, there were repeated efforts to use "drone comb" as honey super foundation, in hopes of easing extraction or reducing the wax-to-honey ratio in a filled super, but this had nothing to do with brood comb. > It has only taken a bit of time for beekeepers mistakes to finally > catch up and bite them in the rear. What specific "mistake" did everyone make? If the claim is that beekeepers and/or foundation makers enlarged cell sizes, everyone still awaits any factual support for the claim to contradict what information we do have. > Somebody has to be able to put two and two together to figure > this simple equation out. There is a great deal of difference between wanting something to be "true" "easy", and "simple", and the actual state of reality. Admitting that there is no single "simple" answer to the problems posed by pests and diseases is the first step on the road to staying a beekeeper for more than a season or two. The truth is that one needs a more complex toolkit to deal with the more complex environment our bees must survive. It is not "simple", and it is not "easy". It is hard work. Just like beekeeping always has been. Now it is harder. It saddens me to see the effect of "true believers", since most not only get discouraged and give up beekeeping after a season or two of frustration, but their initial enthusiasm drags many neophyte beekeepers down the tubes with them. One can see this in analysis of subscriber lists to beekeeping magazines, mailing lists for beekeeping catalogs, and one might be able to see the effect in the backups of the subscription list of this mailing list. The sad dirty little secret about fashionable nonsense as applied to beekeeping is that it turns relatively new beekeepers into ex-beekeepers at an alarming rate. It threatens the industry itself, since equipment suppliers, magazines, and breeders all need a minimum number of beekeeper customers to exist to stay in business, and without such vendors and services, beekeeping would be impractical for most. > This is not Rocket Science and you do not need a Ph.D. to figure it out. Yes it is, and yes it is. That's what's different about beekeeping now. We have all these exotic invasives to deal with. They kill colonies. Voodo and crystals don't save coloines. Science does. OK, a Ph.D. is not really required, but a great deal of technical skill is required to even do simple things like merely DETECT the diseases and pests that are claimed to be somehow "defeated" by small cell foundation. Quick, how many of these could YOU test for and detect? Viruses Paralysis Sacbrood Acute Paralysis and Kashmir Virus Deformed Wing & Egyptian Bee Virus Slow Paralysis Virus Black Queen Cell Virus Filamentous Virus Y Virus Bee Virus "X" Cloudy Wing Virus Apris iridescent virus Akansas Bee Virus Bacteria American Foulbrood European Foulbrood Septicemia Powdery Scale Disease Spiroplasmas Rickettsial Disease Protozoa Nosema Amoeba Disease Gregarines Flagellates Fungi Chalkbrood Bettsia Alvei Stonebrood Melanosis Trichoderma lignorum Mucor mucedo Aspergillus niger Claviceps (Only genus known for this one) Nematodes Agamomermis Pest Insects Greater Wax Moth Lesser Wax Moth Driedfruit Moth Braula coeca Other Braulidae Asilidae Phoridae Calliphoridae Pollenia Conopidae Phoridae Sarcophagidae Tachinidae Mites Non-phoretic Mites Acarus siro Acarus immoblis Tyrophagus putrescentiae Tyrophagus longior Tyrophagus palmarum Tyrolichus casei Oudemans Carpoglyphus lactis Suidasia pontifica Phoretic Mites Neocypholaelaps (in general) Neocypholaelaps indica Neocypholaelaps favus Afrocypholaelaps (in general) Afrocypholaelaps africana Edbarellus (in general) Tropilaelaps Tarsonemus Pseudacarapis indoapis Parasitic Mites Varroa jacobsoni Varroa destructor Varroa underwoodi Euvarroa sinhai Euvarroa wongsiri Tropolaelaps clareae Tropolaelaps koenigerum Acarapis externus Acarapis dorsalis Acarapis woodi Pyemotes ventricosus cohort Parasitengona of the suborder Prostigmata Erythraeidae: Leptus You can't deal with diseases and pests you can't detect, and you can't detect many of the above without a serious investment of time, effort, and cash for toys. The good news is that anyone on the planet can send samples to the USDA ARS at Beltsville and get free analysis of anything they'd like with a simple "please". (Thanks to Mark and his gang in Beltsville!) The bad news is that there have been no "small cell" beekeepers sending samples to Beltsville for tests, something that might help to support the claims being tossed about. > The father of American beekeeping, Langstroth, was not an > Etymologist but was a mathematician Yes, any educated person can think clearly even if working outside his field of specific education. But even "education" does not insure that one thinks clearly. Non-fuzzy thinking is a science in its own right. > The answers to today's problems in beekeeping may come from an > individual that is not schooled in etymology or scientific methods. How true - "Etymology" is a big problem in this regard. :) The proponents of alternative approaches are using far to many words and terms incorrectly, indicating a need to master ETYMOLOGY (the study of words), but they are doing far too little actual ENTOMOLOGY (the study of insects) to provide more than unsupported claims. This leads us down the path of getting into EPISTEMOLOGY, where we are forced to address "how we know what we think we know". We end up stalled and out of gas at a dead end in "OLOGY", where we get way off-topic in "the study of" everything and anything. (I should not poke a simple typo so hard, but the typo was very revealing of a basic problem in the discussion!!) Regardless, without a minimum of "scientific method", an "answer" cannot be shown to be an actual "answer". A trip to any public library or a few web searches can equip anyone with more than enough knowledge to gain a practical grasp of "scientific method" sufficient to design a decent "study". There is no excuse for not learning such things if one wants to do even simple things, like keep good records of observations on how one's hives are doing. The only investment required is a buck twenty-nine for a spiral notebook in which to keep one's notes. > The answers may come from a simple beekeeper who desires to be able > to manage his/her colonies without the use of chemicals and therefore be > able to manage more colonies than would have normally been possible. Until the colonies die off, which appears to be what happens at present to most beekeepers who try to do this. It is sad, but it appears to be true. One simply never hears from most proponents of alternative treatments and approaches after their initial and highly speculative statements. > We should be exploring even methods devised by beekeepers who are not > necessarily of the scientific community but even someone that is simply a > beekeeper. You appear to be doing so. Good! Please keep us advised. This list hears many impassioned statements from beekeepers who become convinced that an alternative approach will work, but we hear very little in the way of follow-up reports from people who use these alternative approaches for multiple seasons. The obvious conclusion is that time and experience is a harsh mistress. I remain certain that even minor successes will be trumpeted from the rooftops, but the silence has been deafening. > It was exploration that found America even though most people thought > that the explorers would die when they fell over the end of the earth. That was a fairy tale told by Washington Irving, who wrote the original myth about Christopher Columbus and his "discovery" of the "New World": In fact, Plato offered the first known comment that the Earth was spherical. The first known recorded observational proof of this suggestion was Aristotle's writing that the shadow cast by the Earth on the Moon was circular. Further, Erathosthenes (276-196 B.C.E.), who is credited with coining the term "geography", was able to measure the circumference of the Earth with excellent accuracy using only a well, a shadow, and some clear thinking. (A measurement of a "circumference" clearly implies that something is understood to be round. The greeks knew all about circles and spheres.) The point here is that "science" is much more an incremental process than one might expect. Rarely are "discoveries" not preceded by hints and clues that make the "discovery" little more than verification and proof that the clues were correct. If you want to make progress, first look for clues, and then try and take things one step further. Or, put more simply: Anyone wanting to "do science" first needs to get a clue. :) > Explore, test, try, trial different methods but do not ridicule > someone else's unproven methods unless you have tried it first. OK, but when someone presents a mix of random claims and fuzzy reasoning as a basis for diverting the tiny amount of funding available to "bee research" into their pet theory du jour about bee management practices, please understand that nothing is being "ridiculed". What is being REFUTED is not the basic idea, but the complete lack of any rigor in the arguments offered in support of the idea, and a complete lack of any tangible evidence to support the claims made. Trust that any hint of a promising avenue of inquiry will interest multiple qualified researchers enough to result in good-quality research. These folks truly ARE concerned about the basic survival of the industry, and they are both "caring" and "honest" Anyone else who calls a group of scientists by insulting names can expect another Norse Saga like this one in reply. jim