>Anyone who has spent time with the historical literature knows that
beekeepers have always been concerned about queen quality.

Pete, queen acceptance and survivability started to drop slightly shortly
after varroa settled into my operation many years ago (I was using Apistan
at the time).  Then there were huge problems when the queen producers were
switching from Mavrik to coumaphos.

The producers generally cleaned up their hive chemistry, and have struggled
since with complaints of excessively poor rates of acceptance or
survivability.  But as I said, they may not experience this in their own
operations (although some have told me of frustration in watching new
queens quickly go bad after introducing them into certain hives).

The proportion of complaints certainly appears to have risen.  But so many
factors have changed (several mentioned in my last post), that it is
difficult to determine the reasons, and likely that several are involved in
different cases.

-- 
Randy Oliver
Grass Valley, CA
www.ScientificBeekeeping.com

             ***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software.  For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html