a Mark snip...
'Christina seems to have a poor opinion of commercial beekeepers, queen rearers, and nuc producers/sellers. Wherever did these ideas come from? "culled queens"? What are those? The ones someone is replacing? If a commercial beekeeper is replacing queens she doesn't have time to cage and sell the original queens. Much more efficient to kill them, if that's how one replaces queens.'

Et replies...
For those of us who have done time on the front lines of commercial beekeeping/queen rearing I would not be so willing to toss Christina's accusations out the window without looking a bit deeper.  Personally I have seen DIRECT EVIDENCE* that what she claims does have some weight and after talking with several fairly serious hobby folks (all with plenty of academic credentials but little beekeeping experience) some years back about the total collapse of purchased nucs (all from a certain geographical area of the country) at least I could make a direct connection between what I would call 'dumping' by large commercial pollinators of potentially contaminated equipment (coming out of the California almonds) and bees to the hobby crowd.  Large death loss by inexperience folks is somewhat understandable.... but a total loss by all (some of whom did have some beekeeping experience) is simply too difficult to explain. 

This is not to suggest that all or even a majority of beekeeper who produce queens or nucs would produces such a sorry product and in fact most have too much pride in what they produce to take such short cuts.   However there is plenty of evidence in the past and currently to suggest to me that everyone in the bee business does not necessarily have a pristine reputation and the fact is some folks would sell their mother to the devil for a buck.  As far as I know all business or industries or academia have a certain set of folks who only seem capable of conjuring up corners they can cut in order to pad their wallets. Sadly some human failing just seem to persistent over a very long time horizon to totally ignore or discount.

And of course now we have a flood of new folks to beekeeping who seem to have delusions that they can produce queens, packages and nucs without any prior experience which would make any judgement as to the quality of their product a bit blurred.  Reasonable the same folks have no personal reputation or brand to protect. 

* the first time I saw evidence of this directly was in about 1983 in regards to producing packages of bees for the Sears and Roebuck catalogue and the midnight queens we had purchased and were suppose to stuff in the packages did show direct evidence that they had been caught from existing hives.  It was the thinking of my employer (a second generation beekeeping who ran about 5000 hives) that on the last round of package shaking the seller had simply caught up every queen in the queen excluder basket that looked anything like a midnight and sold it as a new queen.  What was obvious to me was the queens in their introduction cages did have some age on them and were not 'fresh'.  My employer at the time seem to think that shipping those queens would lead to massive package failure and superscedure and consequently to the eventual replacement of the packages.  Although I will not reveal the name attached to this small bit of larceny I will tell you that they are still in the bee business and at least some more recent evidence suggest to me they are still performing the same slight of hand.         

  

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