> even dead ends are valuable, so that we can stop wasting our time on things	

Getting a negative result published is essentially impossible.  Archiving the dataset, metadata, and other "supplemental materials" from such a negative result so that others can see what one did is NEVER funded, so it is even more difficult than "impossible".

One can post one's findings to a pre-print ArXiv site (such as bioRxiv, for biology, the closest match for bee work), but even that takes considerable unfunded time and effort, as no one is going to pay for the considerable time required to write, debate, and edit among the paper's contributors.  It is very common these days for papers to have more listed contributors than paragraphs, so not only is science a full-body contact sport, it is very much a TEAM sport - there simply are no solo practitioners of the craft any more.

Dave Tarpy has been adding to the list of what ISN'T the proximate cause of the sharp decline in "queen quality" for more than a decade now.  It needs a baseline and a beat, so we can all sing along.  (I did a similar thing at an EAS many years ago putting a laundry list of recent findings into an English version of "Barbara's Rhabarberbar", an old German tongue-twister about Barbara and her Rhubarb pie. We were drinking, Kim Flottum and I, and when we got drinking...)

Could there bee a BeeXiv?  Sure, it's inevitable, might as well start now.

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