on Wed, 1 Nov 1995, Marc Party wrote: > Folks, I'll be signing off of the Bee discussion group as soon as I figure > out how. Can anyone out there please help me out with this? > > It has become too much for me. My in box is cluttered with messages. I > know I have contributed my share in the past, but my initial enthusiasm has > waned. ... Hi, As groups like bee-l and sci.agriculture.beekeeping get bigger it is inevitable that people leave due to overload. Someone recently wrote directly to me asking if there was a UK mailing list because bee-l and sci.a.b were very USA oriented. Maybe it's time we started considering splitting bee-l and/or sci.a.b into context related subgroups. Bee-l is supposed to be for "Discussion on Bee Biology". We have tended to stray substantially from that into bee farming, honey production, wax uses and so on. Maybe bee-l should be returned to its original mandate and a new line for non-biology related stuff should be started. What think? A better candidate still for splitting would be sci.a.b (except that not everyone who gets bee-l can get newsgroups). I think that sci.a.b's mandate is wider and maybe less biology oriented. An advantage with newsgroups is also that one can more easily filter stuff automatically for example, I always exclude postings with LOCAL in the subject line because that _usually_ means USA somewhere. Similarly, I'd probably filter our bears in the subject line -- not a problem we have in England ;-). I think that we could consider moving towards something like the following, perhaps starting with the * ones. sci.agriculture.beekeeping sci.a.b.biology * sci.a.b.ecology sci.a.b.farming * sci.a.b.help * sci.a.b.hive-produce sci.a.b.honey sci.a.b.newbee * sci.a.b.other-bees sci.a.b.pests sci.a.b.pollination Incidently, that suggested starting point is intended only to reflect what I think is a reasonable spread of interests, not some particular interest of mine -- I personally would subscribe to most anyway. Maybe others would view the mix differently -- maybe pests should be there?. Best regards, -- Gordon Scott [log in to unmask] Hampshire, England. [log in to unmask] Beekeeper; Kendo 3rd Dan; Sometime sailor. The Basingstoke Beekeeper (newsletter) [log in to unmask]