NOLAN (1925) has provided a good record of the quantities of brood in honeybee colonies during the summer months, but the position over winter, though fundamentally no less interesting, has been far less certainly investigated. This has been the result of the very strong tradition that bees should be left strictly alone during the winter-- a tradition which, with discretion and common sense, may be broken much more freely than is usually imagined. The figures in Table 1 show that at Aberdeen the quantity of brood in the months when bees are wintering drops to a minimum in October and November. In October only one in seven of the colonies examined had brood. In November the ratio had risen to one in four, and in December and January brood was present at half of the examinations. In February and March, twelve colonies out of every 13 had some brood. Table 2 suggests that some colonies (as Colony B) may have had brood throughout the winter, others (as Colony D) had some intermittently, while others (Colonies C, O and F) may have had just one fairly long broodless interval, persisting in breeding once they had started again. These results coincide fairly closely with Wedmore's idea of a period of quiescence followed by brood-rearing as soon as colder conditions set in; but nevertheless attempts in this laboratory to correlate the amount of brood in individual winter months with temperature fluctuations have not so far been successful. WINTER BROOD AND POLLEN IN HONEYBEE COLONIES by EdWard P. JEFFREE, B. Sc. (Bee Besearch Department, North of Scotland College of Agriculture, Marlschal College, Aberdeen.) INSECTES SOCIAUX, TOME III, No 3, 1956. page 28 *********************************************** 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 Access BEE-L directly at: http://community.lsoft.com/scripts/wa-LSOFTDONATIONS.exe?A0=BEE-L