Charles wrote:

"Doing both pollination and honey.  It seems to be an easy pick,  but add in swarming, mite issues, honey production and winter size and weather changes  and I am still puzzled as to which queens to pull from!"

In my quirky location, a small peninsula bisected by the USA/Canada border, and reasonably isolated from other bee stocks, it used to be all the bees on the USA side were Italian, all the bees on the Canada side were/are New Zealand Carniolans (for the most part).

Of course the bees are world citizens, so mated freely across the international boundary, making the local bee genome a dog's breakfast of mostly Italian/Carniolan multi-generational crosses with the odd Russian thrown in from extinct survivor yard experiments.

So. In my queen improvement project (on which Randy and Jerry kindly advised me), I can only pull queens (choose breeder queens) based on their performance...no way we could distinguish based on race any longer. 

At the end of our third season, I think I see results already (although I have to temper my enthusiasm a bit: we've had a wonderful season all up and down the PacNW coast, with record spring honey + pollen flows and a good run of blackberry too, so most colonies did much better than usual and they all wanted to swarm again and again). In particular it seems there is a lack of the usual dud contingent in the apiary....there are few/none of those mediocre type queens who barely keep the hive ticking over, and whose colonies make minimal increase or honey, even when others do. No unexpected supercedures, or disappearing queens, which used to happen all too often, particularly with that season's package imports.

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