Just for everyone's interest, here is what happened to the daughters of ESBA1, our colony from our five survivors than seemed the best fit to both close to pure Amm and gentle. The bees were all dark earlier in the spring, then the mother colony had a few Italian drifters. Now the daughter queens are showing a large amount of Italian blood in them, so we can now look forward to thoroughly mixed-up genetics and some hard to handle progeny.

We have five virgins more from this stock in Apideas that will not be let out until they've been driven far away tomorrow morning, and two others that might or might not have been mated yet but weren't laying on Sunday.



There are images elsewhere of the uncontaminated mother colony ... and here is Jon's plot of the wing data: http://www.sbai.org.uk/sbai_forum/sh...D-plots/page30

G.