"  And one or more of those fresh
queens will generally fail within a month (no caging, shipping, or
pesticide exposure).  "

Perhaps my experience is irrelevant due to the small number of queens I raised.  Only 30 or 40 a year.  I do not recall any queens that started ok and failed in a month.  I have had two queens that started laying very late and both were drone layers from egg one.  I have had queens start to lay and in a week show signs of EFB and get superseded but that is not queen failure in my mind.  If you are seeing 3% failure in a month I would personally suspect EFB or some disease.  EFB in my small operation seems exclusively a problem in new nucs.  Perhaps something to do with old nurse bees perhaps contributes to it?  It would be interesting for you to take 100 queen mating nucs and treat with terra a couple of times when the new queen starts to lay and see if that 3% failure rate went away.

I have had one II queen that the bees wanted to supersede within the first two weeks.  I pulled supersedure cells every two or three weeks all summer until Sept and within three weeks she was gone after I stopped.  She laid a fine pattern of worker brood up to the end.  She had all her legs and wings.  She was well within the normal bell curve in terms of total brood production.  She was in a five over five deep nuc the whole summer.

I know one small commercial queen producer who routinely does not pull queens for sale until he sees sealed brood.  I have never asked him how many queens he produces for sale a year but think it is someplace around 1000 based on pics of his mating yards.  His prices are very competitive.  In fact lower than I have paid for queens from a real big producer.

Prices of queens is governed by the free enterprise system.  Queen producers charge what they charge because if they went too much higher the competition would take their business away from them.  Personally I do not see why any of them would be willing to sell a single queen for under $50 and some are real close to that right now.  I bought a batch of five last year and total price including shipping and handling was $180.  List on those queens was $25 as I remember.  If I had bought one I am sure it would have been over $50 total.  Even at $50 I doubt if they make a penny.  Their real butter comes from selling 200 or 1000 or more in a batch.  Then they have to match the price the guy in the next state charges which on large batches today seems to be in the low to mid $20s plus a dribble for shipping or they do not get the sale.  All you need to do to get higher prices is get rid of the free enterprise economic system.   One good way to do this would be to slap a bunch of federal regulations on the business and load the producers up with paper work and get rid of all the smaller producers who can not afford the paper work.

Dick
--------------------------------------------
On Sat, 4/8/17, randy oliver <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

 Subject: Re: [BEE-L] Change in subject... queen rearing
 To: [log in to unmask]
 Date: Saturday, April 8, 2017, 12:08 AM
 
 >it is the simple realities of
 expecting living creatures to "perform" to a
 minimum standard.
 
 If I start a yard of 36 nearly-identical nucs
 all headed by sister queens
 mated at the
 same time in the same yard, the individual performances
 of
 those 36 colonies, as measured by colony
 strength and weight gain, will
 follow a
 normal curve, with a few barely growing at all, and a few
 producing 3x as much honey as average.  And
 one or more of those fresh
 queens will
 generally fail within a month (no caging, shipping, or
 pesticide exposure).  Queens and colonies are
 not like cloned fruit
 trees--each colony
 performs differently.
 
 --
 
 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
 

             ***********************************************
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