Hi Eric

 > I'm skeptical of this line of reasoning.  Can I then say, bees are
 > not wasteful, they make the amount of honey that they require,
 > artificially removing it disturbs the rhythm of what the bees
 > consider 'normal'?

There is a flaw in this... Bees are opportunists and will gather as much 
honey as they can (for a rainy day), the keyword here is 'surplus', bees 
can survive on 'X' amount of honey, if, by their diligence, they achieve 
  4X amount of honey, then they can still survive if 3X is taken away. 
This is the premise that beekeeping is founded upon and if it were wrong 
then we would have seen bee stocks dwindling over the thousand or so 
years that we have any sort of record of.

Going back to the drones, the numbers require to be high, because only 
something like one in 200 of them ever get the chance to mate in their 
lifetime. The biggest problem for drones is the erroneous human 
observation (of a century or so ago) that drones are 'lazy' or 'useless' 
which colours beekeeper's judgement even through to the present day.


 > Besides which, what if the usefulness of those particular drones
 > isn't especially useful to me?

Regardless of whether you require the drones for breeding purposes, you 
will gain more of a honey crop from bees whose needs for drones are 
satisfied, than from colonies that are under artificial stresses, due to 
shortage of drones.

There is another portion of your post that deals with 'beekeeper 
requirements' versus 'bees requirements'. I can see that beekeeper's 
agendas may be different to the bees needs, but it is still worthwhile 
to work on the basis that if you work 'with' the bees, you will achieve 
more than by trying to work 'against' them.


Regards & Best 73s, Dave Cushman, G8MZY
http://website.lineone.net/~dave.cushman or http://www.dave-cushman.net
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