...here's a good one!
From "Mastering the Art of Beekeeping" Ormond and Harry Aebi Page 173-
"May I Borrow an Egg?
In my research durring the years I had found that on several occasions experimenters and close observers of honeybees had found that a hive of Caucasian bees on becoming queenless would sometimes send a worker to a nearby hive for the purpose of stealing and egg, which it could carry home to its own hive. Then the hive bees built a queen cell and raised themselves a new queen. But the Caucasians were the only bees reported to have this ability. For a period of years my father and I had a few hives of Caucasians and we had also observed this remarkable trait.
...Our Caucasians had requeened themselves! But they had stolen an egg from one of our Italian hives-and their new queen was an Italian, of course. So in a matter of weeks our Cacasian hive was converted into an Italian colony and in the end we lost all our Caucasisn hives for the same reason."
deknow
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