From: Erik Osterlund <honeybee@elgon.se>
Date: Sat, 12 May 2001 20:30:20 +0200
To: BiologicalBeekeeping@yahoogroups.com
Subject: From 5.5 to 4.8 in Norway

Hi all

Just want to inform you what i friend in Norway reported yesterday. He has
bought a mill from Tom industries and is milling 4.8. He has given a couple
of hundreds of colonies one foundation to check which will draw the best.
He has Elgon bees (African Monticola and Buckfast in combination),
Buckfast, Carniolan and Norwegian mongrels(probably dark Mellifera crossed
with Carniolan). The only two that managde to draw nice 4.8 directly from
5.5 was two Norwegian mongrels. Not any of the ones with African heritage!

Also he bought a lot of 5.10, 5.10, 5.10 foundation (yes the commercial wax
producer managed to do it perfectly regular) from the wax producer in
Sweden that as the first step now is selling ONLY 5.1 foundation. My
Norwegian friend also put on boxes with 5.1 on all kind of bees to see what
they would do with it. ALL of them, regardeless of heritage made nice combs
of them. You could see one odd cell which was not good. That means that
probably many cells were actually 5.2 instead of 5.1 (but bottom were
certainly 5.1). So all colonies managed to go directly from 5.5 to 5.1 you
could say. That's good news. Next season all these colonies will get 4.8
foundation. Would be no problem then.

Regards

Erik