Hi again P-O

I should perhaps mention that I have two breeder queens that are very
different - cosmetically and in other ways - from wild scutellata. One is
brown and the other yellow and both are very large. If a wild scutellata
(or capensis) drifted into one of these breeders' hives, it would stick
out like a very very sore thumb.

These bees have been deliberately "coloured" to hopefully help
beekeepers deal with capensis. They have been upsized in order to
be more cold tolerant. Wild scutellata are always badly hurt by cold.
Among the African races, the mountain races, e.g., monticola, are
larger than the lowland honeybees.

These two breeder queens of mine produce workers that draw "own"
cells in the range of 5.1 - 5.3mm. I hesitate to give a definitive average,
but it would be around 5.2mm.

I treated only one of these two colonies for varroa, and not the other.
Neither exhibit any hurt from varroa.

A final comment would be that the worker bees appear to be as
"quick" as the smaller wild bees. In other words, they are larger, but
proportionately so. A final remark should be that it would not have
been possible to produce these bigger scutellata without such-sized
bees occurring naturally, albeit occasionally. The larger size is a
recessive that can be fixed by selective II breeding.

Barry in Kyalami