Hi all:

1.  Bee escapes are fine, if you have the luxery of waiting for the bees to
leave - doesn't work so well when the truck and crew are waiting to pull
supers in a yard of 50-100 colonies.

2. Lots of different ways to use blowers -- and yes, we often drop a cover
on the ground to catch bees that we knock off frames.

3.  Speaking of  covers, best idea I found was a combination cover, bottom
board, hive stand used by a commercial guy who didn't use pallets.  Kept
the hives off the ground, and he never had too many bottom boards and not
enough covers, etc. as he made splits, etc.

4. Chemicals used to drive bees end up in wax and causing queens to
supercede - mainly when overused -- if a little bit works, lets use a lot
to speed up the process.

5. Your call as to whether queen supercedure is good in the middle of the
main honey flow.  To hear some on this list, the replacement queen must be
inherently inferior since she developed and mated on her own.  Personally,
I don't like the unplanned, several week shutdown of brood rearing.  But,
I'm not convinced that the bees can't do as good a job as a queen grafter.


6.  Understanding/mapping the bee genome has merit.  What we do with the
information has pros and cons.  We've already been down the path of "let's
create a better bee" using slower and less informed ways of
breeding/hybridizing (and I'm not even including genetic tinkering)and
sometimes had apparent success -- with problems often popping up later.

Disappearing disease in bees, hybrid corn that was so removed from the
original gene pool that it lost resistance to some specific diseases.

7.  In the race to embrace or stone genome work, maybe we should ask what
traits we'd like to see in bees and why.  For example, one breeder, who is
involved with this work, dreams of improving a bee's memory.  Nice idea,
but what's the end result?  Will that bee better work a new crop, or will
it remember one in decline, and continue to work it?

For our training of bees to find things, we don't think that we would  want
to improve their memory -- its just as likely that they will then begin to
remember that we often fail to reward them for finding the target of
interest.  Nor is it likely to be as easy to switch them over to search for
something else.  At this point, the advantage of working with bees over
dogs, is that unlike dogs, the bees are a bit easier to fool.  We may not
want a smarter bee.

8. Lot's of uncertainties about genome work.  The breakthroughs could be
great.  No doubt, we will accelerate our ability to modify bees and bee
behavior.  That also means that we will be able to get into trouble faster.

9.  I'm always pro new research and technologies that can help the
industry, just be careful about what you wish for.  Our own work is
beginning to show that we don't know nearly as much about bees and bee
behavior as we thought -- so we also need to work on a better understanding
of the bee itself before we start manipulating its genetics.

Cheers





Jerry J. Bromenshenk
Research Professor
The University of Montana-Missoula
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406-243-5648
406-243-4184
http://www.umt.edu/biology/bees