Welcome to new BEE-L subscribers.

For those who are just trying to figure things out and are wondering about an
FAQ and rules for posting to this list, please visit
http://www.internode.net/Honeybee/BEE-L/ and browse some of the related pages
there.  In particular, *please read the guidelines*.

Checking these pages out will give you a sense of the flavour of BEE-L and its
history and how to fit in comfortably.  You might also like to browse the
archives from there and read the discussions and debates in the past between
some pretty good beekeepers, some of whom are no longer with us.  Pretty well
any subject you can imagine has been covered in the archives to some extent,
but, of course, there is always room for more.

You can post a new article to the list direct from the archive articles, but I
recommend that you set up posting privileges there *before* you write your
epistle, since there seems to be a bug in the web interface that shows up when
posting if you have not previously done so.

BEE-L is a moderated list.  One or all the moderators must approve each post to
BEE-L before it is sent to members. This is to prevent an number of abuses
including SPAM, transmission of viruses or binaries, flaming, trolling, etc.
Approval is pretty well automatic for 95% of what we receive and posts are not
censored for content no matter how controversial -- or dumb -- as long as the
guidelines are observed.

Visiting the guidelines is a good idea for some of the old timers here too,
because we still get some posts with huge sigs, attachments, or excessive quotes
from some who should know better.   Usually the moderators simply ignore and
delete any posts that do not conform to the guidelines, although there are
exceptions when a moderator has a bit of spare time or is an unusually good
mood.

Beginners in particular may want to try to also subscribe to
sci.agriculture.beekeeping (s.a.b), a longstanding USENET group that is lately
developing into a very good forum for a wide range of topics from the most basic
to the technical.  I have put together a page at
http://www.internode.net/Honeybee/Bee/sci.htm to assist those who are having
problems getting a good newsfeed to get to read s.a.b and to give good simple
access to a power search of their archives.  Some of my
sci.agriculture.beekeeping is out-of-date, though, since I notice lately that
Remarq is no longer working.  Most of the info is good, however.

allen