Dennis:
FWIW, I have never seen this behavior you describe with hot
bees. But then we keep locally acclimitized honeybees and
on SC and don't feed artificial food. Makes one wonder the
state of our honeybees over the years to genetic mixture,
and artificial food, besides the various treatments. As
take these three away, and put the bees back onto a more
natural sizing and the bees certainly don't do as you
describe.
Also leads to another question: If boiling water changes
it's schematics with latitude and altitude, then perhaps
changing the size of the bees, and it's diet, and taking
away all various treatments, changes the schematics also in
doing bee research. Wonder how much research would stand
with another test or inclusion of another level of testing
to put the bees on either SC or use SC as a control
somewhere in the experiment, or other? experiment in point.
Recently Joe posted on an experiment done with pollen
gathering and it making for better breeding in bees that
naturally gather more pollen, done at ASU."Results from the
experiment validated her hypothesis showing that pollen
collection was primarily conducted by worker bees with
larger ovaries, cementing the
connection between high pollen-hoarding strains and
reproductive traits."
So question for you to ponder:
If SC bees are better pollen hoarders in general, as bees
fill SC first before going to the larger, then LC bees on
comb more applicable to honey gathering would gather less
pollen. But in saying this, this would be new in the bees
world this past 100 years or so, and not very old in
habits, so if this experiment was to be carried to a higher
level IMPOV to see if it stands, then why cannot the bees
be reversed and see what happens by putting the high pollen
gatherers on LC drawnout combs in the broodnest, etc and
the lesser pollen gatherers on SC drawnout combs in the
broodnest, and then see if the experiment stands with
strain/race or maybe instead reverses itself............
Just sitting here thinking..........
Respectfully submitted,
Dee A. Lusby
Small Cell Commercial Beekeeper
Moyza, Arizona
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/organicbeekeepers/
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