Waldemar writes:  “Why make the distinction between the brood nest and the 
honey supers?”

     It’s not simply a distinction between plastic foundation in brood nest 
and honey supers.  It has come to the point of using plastic COMB in the 
brood nest.  The point is when does common sense tell us enough is enough?  
And it is not only about fumes.  For all I know there may not be any 
harmful fumes.  It’s more about all the subtle reasons bees do what they do 
in nature and the potentially positive effects of being able to do what 
they do.  It is reasonable to assume that bees do not, as a species, work 
to their own disadvantage when they are allowed to do what they are most 
suited for.  It is foolish for us to think that we can know all the 
benefits they get from doing things the way they have evolved to do them 
over the millennia.  And yet we can imagine that there are a lot of very 
minor, even barely observable factors, along with major ones, that are 
interrelated in a fine matrix.  It makes sense to me that, given at least 
half an opportunity, bees would usually be able to maintain the delicate 
balance within this matrix more or less optimally for themselves.  What can 
we expect if we systematically take more and more of their ability to work 
with the fundamental elements of their environment away from them?  I can 
certainly see how it could get to the point where a modern beekeeper might 
get way out of touch with what a bee hive is able to do when it is allowed 
to make a greater proportion of its own adjustments within the somewhat 
artificial limits of a Langstroth set up. 
  As Peter Borst said in another thread, beekeepers love to try stuff, and 
that is great, but there should always be a point of reference to look back 
to, or fall back on, to keep things in perspective.  What I have been 
trying to communicate is that that point of reference should be what bees 
do naturally without the extremes of our complicated strategies for getting 
them to yield more profit for us.  Everything should be looked at in terms 
of how far away from that natural state it gets.  Then, when you get way 
out there with things like plastic comb and humongous holding yards, and 
things go wrong, you may be able to say, “Oops! Guess I need to get back a 
little closer to bee basics.”, and still have some idea of what that means.
   Randy Oliver and others do fun experiments, and it’s all for the good as 
long as he and we keep in mind that the parameters those experiments are 
working with represent a very small segment of a much larger picture.  What 
we may rightly conclude are positive results in terms of these limited 
parameters may be misleading when we try to extrapolate from them to the 
larger context.  What I get from all this is that if you are unable to gain 
a clear sense of how the effects of a given strategy or gimmick extend into 
and throughout the grand Apis scheme of things you should treat it with a 
healthy degree of skepticism if not down right suspicion.  That probably 
applies to a lot of what is practiced in beekeeping these days. 


Steve Noble  

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