Randy I agree, how one approaches the task is important, and bees have memory - so if they get disturbed every time the weed whacker starts up, they'll hit the operator before he/she even gets near the hives. If you want evidence of training - Brian Smith got them to look for food in response to alarm pheromone. Scott has 'tamed' nasty colonies. They like him, hit everyone else. When I was doing landscape pollution monitoring and collecting samples from our citizen scientists - I found lots who said their colonies were hot tempered. If you watch them, they suit up, often skip or misuse smoke, and bang everything around. I'd grab a smoker and work same colony in short sleeves, often without a veil. One thing common to these backyard volunteers, most came home from days work, played with kids, maybe had a drink, had dinner, and just as the shadows were getting long decided that it was a good time to look at their bees. My rule of thumb to my crews - when the shadow of the hive is longer than the hive is tall, time to quit. *********************************************** 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