To bring you up to date for this post, you should refresh your memory about my big bees. Now here is the rest of the story.

I was at Dadant and Sons in High Springs, Florida picking up some bee supplies when the Head Lab Technician for the Gainesville University of Florida lab walked in. I asked him why did he need more bees to test? He said that when he got the first report, the only thing he could visualize was that the tech tested some drones instead of workers. After the tech scathingly told him that she knew the difference between drones and workers, he decided that he needed to run his own test. That was the reason for the second batch of test bees.

He told me that these bees were the largest bees to come through the Gainesville lab. I had the record for the largest bees and that they were free of Varroa Mites but they had plenty of Trachea Mites. He wanted to know what I did to the bees to develop such large ones. I have no idea why they developed as large as they did. I do know that I goofed up when I decided to requeen in the fall. I forgot about those bees when I requeened all of the colonies. I should have kept them to see if it was a genetic evolved phenomenon and if I could have grafted from them to make all my bees bigger.

However, as it was I requeened and lost the chance to experiment. When you get something like this that is not detrimental, try to find out why and see if you can expand on it. Maybe my drones are carriers of this condition and will bring it back by way of new vergin queens. Only time will tell.