What Roger has written is right but then I think that it depends upon the container implementation My point was that it should have been left over to the container provider and in hurry i wrote something else [the above lines in my previous post].
Also, it makes perfect sense for a container to always activate a passivated bean in order to invoke ejbRemove() on it. Just think of the confusion if your code in ejbRemove() may or may not be run depending on whether the bean instance happened to be passivated or not. There are many cases when the ejbRemove() may not be called like bean times out in passivated state. The above case won't be the only scenario. I was just thinking from the point of view of the performance that it doesn't makes much sense to activate the passivated bean and remove it. Its a performance kill.
Anyways if this is what specs says then there is nothing much to write
sawan
SCJP 1.4, SCWCD 1.3, SCBCD 1.3