Back from Las Vegas

I went to a medical review class in Las Vegas earlier this week, getting back Thursday evening.  Before I left, I went into the hives with Mickey.  We took a look around the old hive first.
We saw lots of capped honey in both the supers and the deep boxes.  I expect there will be a harvest this fall.  (Seth, I hope you can come down and help.)
There was a lot of brood, mostly in the lower brood box, but also a bit in the upper brood box.  We didn't spot the queen.  There was nothing happening on the drone frame, so I left it in.  In retrospect, I probably should have replaced it with a regular frame since drone season is over or nearly so.  Next time I go in I plan to replace it.
We also took a look into the nuc. We didn't see the queen there, either.  There was a lot of capped brood and larvae of all ages.  There was drawn comb on all the frames.  There was capped honey as well as nectar.  The nectar appeared clear and I assume it's mostly sugar water honey.  I decided to stop feeding the girls.  I won't refill the bottle again.

I went into the new hive today to replace the Apiguard.  One is supposed to put the new pack in after 7 days, but as I said above, I was in Las Vegas.  I noticed a few drones buzzing around.  For fun, I caught a couple and inspected them for mites and there were none.  I had intended to would replace the drone frame with a regular frame.  But the drone frame cells were filled with nectar and even some capped honey.  I deduce that drone season is over as I had suspected.  (I suppose I could just look in my books or online to confirm the end of drone season.)  Much of the thymol gel was still in the tray, although dried up.  I put a new tray in and broke up the old stuff onto it.

While I was away, Maidi took this great picture of the bees in Just Joey.  Can you see all five?
I did write to Jeremy Rose about the swarming  and apparent mite tolerance.  His response: 
Thank you for that information... that is very interesting!  Makes me very curious as to what is really going on.  Sometimes I have seen hives swarm and then actually recover from the mites, maybe that is what yours attempted to do unsuccessfully.  Maybe sometime I will give you a call and try to come by if I am in the area and look at all of those hives.  I am happy to hear that it is still alive, at least.  Sorry they aren't holding off the mites like I thought they would... I produce such a variation of queens that it is hard to know which ones are survivors and which are not.  Sometimes I don't find out which ones are resistant until the following season, and it is not black and white in many cases.  I hope he does come by.
I also wrote to Tom Seeley asking about studies pertaining to the propensity to swarm.  His reply:

I'm sorry, Tom, although I agree with you that there are probably genetic effects on the tendency of a colony to swarm, I don't know of any published work on this topic.  The best that I can offer is a study done by one of my students that looked rigorously on "personality" differences between colonies of honey bees (see attachment).   As you will see, this phenomenon is real, and is now well documented.   Yours truly, Tom Seeley 

The study is Collective personalities in honeybee colonies are linked to colony fitness, in Animal Behavior 81, 2011.  I will send you a copy if you're interested.  What professor Seeley should have said is: "What an fascinating question!  I will suggest it as a thesis topic for one of my graduate students."

I also wrote to a professor at UC Davis, Eric Mussen.  He sends out a quarterly newsletter to which I subscribe.  It is scholarly and interesting.  He emailed me (My letter regular, his reply italics):

 Hi, Tom, I'll deal with your questions in order, but I am going to be short on
answers.
In mid-May this year I purchased and hived a nuc of Russian bees from Jeremy Rose in Santa Barbara. 16 days later the hive cast a swarm.
It takes 16 days for a queen to be reared from an egg to an adult. However, the old queen will be forced to leave before the new queens emerge. I think that your nuc had queen cells in it, already. 
I captured the swarm and put it into a top bar hive. (The original hive cast a second swarm just 9 days later.)
The colony cannot produce a second queen that quickly from scratch, so what left the second time was an after-swarm. Commonly, they leave with a virgin queen from the first swarm session. 
The bees in the top bar hive were doing well, building lots of comb and still had plenty of room as the box was only half-full. Then the top bar hive cast a swarm just 33 days after being placed in the hive. 

That was adequate time for them to rear a new batch of queens. 
It seems to me that the queen I purchased in May, and her offspring, have a strong propensity to swarm. I read in beekeeping sites that some strains of bees are more likely than others to swarm.
That is true to a certain extent. Africanized honey bees are much more apt to swarm than European honey bees. But, I think it runs more along individual lines than being a trait for a specific stock. Russian bees tend to produce tons of queen cells compared to our typical European bees, but they also tend to chew most of them down and do not swarm excessively. There were some early Russian lines that swarmed frequently, but the Russian Bee Breeders tried to remove those lines from their stocks. 
What I would like to read are any studies pertaining to that. I haven't been able to find anything online, yet.
I am not going to be much of any help with that. 
Since the trigger to swarm isn't entirely clear and is probably multifactorial, I would think that a single "swarm" gene hasn't been identified.
I believe you are correct, that many genes are involved with the swarming process. The process is not just a single step, but many. Many genes would be involved throughout the process. 
Is the propensity to swarm dominant or recessive?
I am not sure that anyone has studied that, specifically, but being recessive seems to be too dangerous to the species. 
In time, as the new queens mate with wild drones, will the tendency become weaker? 

It sounds like it should, given the fact that "normal" drones will outnumber your high test drones and genes. I wish I could give you a better answer, but there still are many things that we do not know. Eric. 

I guess I'll just have to do my own study.  Maybe I can use Joshi's lab.