OT: scary

That's how the trend looks, at present, but "wild" (more properly, "feral") colonies keep turning up on a regular basis, so there's at least some hope. (Such colonies are also prime places to look for the breeding stock needed to come up with resistant bees - If they're surviving, that makes it at least a reasonable suspicion that they've got some characteristic that's keeping them alive in the face of the mites and diseases, so it's probably at least worth a try to cross them into "tame" strains in hopes of coming up with reliable, breedable resistances.)

Thing to remember: Honeybees are imports - And *VERY* recent ones, when viewed in the context of ecosystems that have been running for umpty-bazillion years. The native plants got along fine with other pollinators (solitary bees like the bumbles, wasps, birds, and others) before us pale-skinned folks dragged honeybees across the ocean from Europe with us to colonize "The New World". I expect that native plants would barely notice the loss if every wild colony of honeybees in existence were to go belly-up tomorrow at noon.

On the other hand, I *KNOW* - Logic dictates that can't possibly be any other way - that wild colonies thrown by hives operated by commercial beekeepers exist and have at least *SOME* impact on commercial crops (both imported and native), so the loss of them might make a small dent. But, since there are beekeepers being hired to drop hives in the orchards/fields to begin with, I suspect the impact will be an effectively invisible "blip" on the radar - hard, if not impossible, to distinguish from "Well, there was rain on the 14th instead of the 15th, and that's what caused our almond/peach/apple/whatever crop to be down by 0.01% this year."

Managed bees are likely to be throwing swarms that don't get hived and end up going feral for many years (centuries?) to come, so I doubt that "wild" bees will ever *TRULY* cease to exist - They'll just be relatively short-lived in comparison to a colony that a beekeeper is taking care of.

Dunno, Carl but I suspect those knarly looking things were the fruit of the osage orange, sometimes called "horse apples". If they were green, dimply and about the size of an orange, probably that's what they were. In some areas of the US, they are planted along fencerows, as windbreaks.

Bob Swinney

Sorry, I should have read more of this thread before I replied re. "horse apples". Thanx, though, to the respondent that filled in the name bois d'arc - not in my dictionery.