>I think I see results already (although I have to temper my enthusiasm a bit: we've had a wonderful season

Janet, Great to hear that you are having a good year. We all deserve one at least once a decade just to keep us coming back for more abuse :-)

My experience has taught me that good forage trumps all. I also tried to improve my queen lines but with I fear too small an operation of around 75 colonies. Mine go out to summer yards of 8-10 and all come home for the winter. I would pick the top performers and graft from them. For a while NWC breeders from Sue and for the last 10 or so years my own mutts with some WSU cells mixed in. I keep track of yield by yard and even make note by colony of how many supers each fills. Also in the winter yard I know where each croup spent the summer. So I know who did what and where. The top performers mostly seem to come from the top yard each year and for a while, like a sucker, I would say what great queens they were. For the last few years I take the poorest preforming yard as a group and move them to the best preforming yard the fallowing summer. You no doubt can guess that they suddenly become the best performers. Abundant season long forage makes everyone look great. Both in production and colony vigor and health, varroa excepted. The best queens from last year in a poor location don't produce squat and have health problems to boot.

I will say that there is a noticeable difference in winter store consumption between the, I assume, my carni based queens and, with all the rough Italian commercial boys in the neighborhood the inevitable Roman influence. They all start winter with 12 frames of capped honey. Most will make in until April fine and with a few frames to spare. Some, while I don't really see a difference in color (I do cull the obviously yellow ones) will be licking the skillet in March. I just mark those for replacement and keep looking for great locations. That is becoming ever more difficult with the additional thousands of colonys coming here for the summer from almonds.

Paul Hosticka
Dayton WA

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