...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

             ***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software.  For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html

Guidelines for posting to BEE-L can be found at:
http://honeybeeworld.com/bee-l/guidelines.htm