> >...Read Maeterlink's "The Life of the Bee"...available on-line at
> >http://www.eldritchpress.org/mm/b.html
>
> I must object to this advice.  The question posed is a technical
> matter of fact, and obviously difficult to answer.   I love Maeterlinck,
as
> literature; but as technical info it is way out of date.  When he wrote,
> many of the main facts on the life of the bee had not been discovered,
much
> less a tricky item so difficult to observe as the queen's voiding.   MM is
> NOT  an authority on this  -  he was just making it up!

 I appreciate both these responses, the first because I was unaware the book
was online, the second because the writer recognises that this is not at all
the simple question that it at first appears to be.

Although I borrowed  the question from the Belgian list, it brings to mind
nagging questions: why are healthy, mated laying queens sometimes found
outside the hive?  Why do marked functional queens sometimes seem to
disappear for a period of time, then reappear?

If anyone has worked bees long enough, and with enough hives of bees, he or
she will have experienced, and perhaps even investigated carefully, one or
more of these anomalies.  The simple fact is that -- although we can predict
and observe bee behaviour fairly well on a gross or mass level, -- we don't,
and perhaps cannot, know much about the subtle, infrequent and perhaps
unique things that occur on an individual level amongst populations of bees.

There are a number of reasons for this and I am not sure I have them all, or
how they rank, but...

* We are big and they are small.  We are mammals and they are insects.

* We don't have the time or patience to observe them constantly or a
language adequate to analyse and record all their complex and changing
activities.  Our observations and distinctions are rather crude and
artificial.  Our observations are limited by time and space and money.  Much
of the work is to establish practical management schemes and is assumed to
have no need to examine subtle small scale behaviours of individual bees.

* We are distracted by previous assertions about bees, some of which is
romantic and fictional, some of which is bad science, and some of which
simply examined a small subset of honey bees in a specific situation and has
since been generalized and assumed to apply far outside the boundaries of
the original intent.

We want to think we understand bees and therefore generalize and make
assumptions beyond what is justified by our limited information.  As we have
learned recently  here on BEE-L and on sci.agriculture.beekeeping, reports
of widely varying and sometimes unexpected bee behaviours are being made by
reasonably credible witnesses.

These variations from the accepted generalizations seem to be linked to
conditions, season, race, locale, environment and individual hive history.
If we take these reports at face value, we can no longer justify assumptions
that what one careful and trained observer will see monitoring one hive --
or even one apiary -- will necessarily be replicated elsewhere -- or even at
a later time in the same apiary.  Honey bee phenomena are turning out to be
more complex, and the range wider, than most of us have previously assumed.

That is not to say that we should give up, or that all observations to date
are meaningless, but to say that -- at this point -- everything we think we
know about bees and their associated organisms is in question and we must
take a careful look at the easy assumptions that have been made in all
observations to present.

Particularly we must recognise that conflicting reports may point to
significant potential discoveries, and not indicate that one person is right
and another wrong.

allen
http://www.internode.net/HoneyBee/