Hi all
Some gremlins decided I should not have any posts from BEE-L for a few days.
I think I now have it sorted :-)
The last mail that I had was under the subject... false premises and
assumptions, from Peter Borst. I have looked at the archives and cannot see
his mail so I assume it was not sent via the list. However my reply to him
contains much that is relevent to my previous plea for som more detailed
research. His question was...
> Dave,
> You never answered my question:
>
> What false premises and assumptions did Marla Spivak take to Costa Rica?
Hi Peter and all
As explained via BEE-L previously...
I have no problems with Marla or her work... She is an attractive woman as
well! :-)
But in a more serious vein, I would comment that the following applies in
equal measure to the majority of what has been published on cellsize.
Averaging many cells produces a figure that is misleading, because it leads
people to believe that comb is "regular".
Now the bees that I have, contain many AMM genes... One of the features of
AMM is the extremeness of size variation of bees and cells, within a colony
or even a single comb.
The only time that you see a high degree of regularity in AMM comb is when a
colonly turns out to have small bees. When this occurs (only about 1 % of
cases or less) the cellsize is in the 5.0 mm to 5.1 mm range. (when it does
occur the effect is striking and very obvious)
This is against a background where AMM is considered a "large bodied bee"
(Cooper, Crane).
To my mind the 5.0 - 5.1 figure aligns pretty well with history up until the
late 1870s/1880s.
Once foundation is invented/discovered things start to go wrong, mainly in
pursuit of "bigger is better" or "longer tongues". Luckily, bees are
adaptable and do adjust to these changes. But the insect has evolved over
millions of years to get to what it was at say 1875.
The aerodynamics of enlarged bees versus naturally sized bees favours any
tendancy for the bees to return to their "historic" size, but the comb built
by stocks of enlarged bees and fresh foundation supplied by the beekeeper
tend to maintain the bees large size. Thus we have a push-pull mechanism
that I believe causes un-nessesary stress, which in turn increases the bees
susceptability to existing and more or less endemic disease organisms.
I would like to see some properly regulated trials conducted to establish
what size the bees are currently conditioned to, what size the bees consider
as natural (just giving them free reign does not achieve this) What limits
bees can be pursuaded to go to, both upwards and downwards. Armed with that
information we may be able to incorporate it as additional information to
our existing theory or some of the "new" information may displace some of
the original theory. I can even foresee that foundation could be produced
that actually incorporates the correct degree of variability for each
regional bee.
I for one, do not "know" the answers, and despite the protestations that
existing theory is sound and complete, I do not think anyone on this planet
yet understands the complexity of this subject.
Best Regards & 73s... Dave Cushman, G8MZY
Beekeeping & Bee Breeding Website...
http://website.lineone.net/~dave.cushman
----- Original Message -----
From: Peter Borst <[log in to unmask]>
To: Dave Cushman <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, February 19, 2002 10:31 AM
Subject: false premises and assumptions
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