I booked the Liquid Nitrogen for delivery on Friday June 15~(th) renting the Dewar storage flask for two weeks. This was a great mistake. One obvious difficulty that I had not foreseen and should have done was that most worthwhile colonies, and of course I was looking for good and weak ones to test, was that getting down into the brood chambers of big successful colonies at the end of June is heavy work. Back then we all were self satisfied with a huge spring crop of honey. So the first lesson to learn is to carry out these tests early in the year when it is easy to get into brood chambers twice in 48 hours. Then the following two weeks were the wettest in a summer of record rainfall. When I could get out to do the test, colonies were understandablyas defensive of their crop as they are inclined to be in August and the hives were broken apart on cold damp days when the bees were all indoors and had been for sometime. Who said "Beekeeping is fun"? So I only managed 21 of the 100 or so that were planned. This has a serious impact on the statistical value of the experiment and I can only record what happened and be very uneasy about drawing conclusions. I have to say that the results were intriguing and tantalising and left me wanting to look at thesituation more closely again. But as I shall point out later, a consideration of cost versus benefit would indicate that the procedure is probably justifiable -just about - given good weather and an early start in the year.
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