Hi Allen That leaves everyone wondering if you normally find as much as 18 hives, which would be two percent, and if this year is, therefore, abnormally low? Reply: Prior to shaking down to 4.9mm top tolerance from 5.0mm - 5.1mm sizing we were then regressing to we would find even more then 18 hives in our outfit that fluxated between 900-1100 colonies. We lived with the mites but the foul was driving us crazy pulling, processing, and retooling and splitting/requeening constantly. It was the foul of the secondary diseases that made us shakedown a second time to the 4.9mm top tolerance sizing, meaning no bigger then 4.9mm until stabilized to see if we could whip the secondary diseases. We had at this time stopped using TM paddies and had switched to propolis patties due to data we had pulled up in looking thru paperwork written, not liking the TM residues (they say it degredates but it is only in sunshine and not internally in hives we found out reading deeply.). Anyway, when we got on the 4.9mm our foul problems started dropping fast and by 3-4 years in were down to very low levels of less then about 10-12 hives, and then kept getting lower each year until the past 3 years or so we haven't found over 1-2 in anyone year that I have had to pull frames from and add clean drawnout combs. By the way, for the record, we don't burn our foul frames, we melt them down, reprocess the wax with our own wax melter to old written standards, and then with foundation embossing machine we make our own foundation and redo our woodenware. Sincerely, Dee A. Lusby Small Cell Commercial Beekeeper Moyza, Arizona http://groups.yahoo.com/group/organicbeekeepers/ __________________________________ Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005 http://mail.yahoo.com -- Visit www.honeybeeworld.com/bee-l for rules, FAQ and other info ---