Peter and All, Your right about bad beekeeping. I think the weather was much warmer than normal last June. We had two weeks with no rain also. The bees he had was a dark native bee. The beekeepers I talked with told me that Ireland was trying to just keep native bees. The beekeeping organizations I talked with said the same thing and wanted to keep imported bees out. What I did see was one of the three hives did the swarming. He was new at it and was in a learning curve . The Best Roy *********************************************** 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