>I wonder how much ofthe 'winter' loss is due to poor queens. And this brings up yet another subject--what do we mean by a "poor queen"? When I start a bunch of colonies from sister queens in "identical" nucs, I get a full bell curve of performance from the resulting colonies. A few queens will also disappear in the first couple of months. One can easily blame the problem on the queen--either directly due to her egglaying, or her pheromonal output. I do not dispute either. Or perhaps she did not get mated to enough of a variety of drones to form a good "team" of patrilines in the hive. However, what I find of great interest are the number of colonies that stage a complete turnaround, without replacing the queen (I saw yet another just today). Perhaps she gets into a pocket of better spermatozoa, but I suspect that the colony has simply cleared itself of a debilitating infection of some sort. -- Randy Oliver Grass Valley, CA www.ScientificBeekeeping.com *********************************************** 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