Dave writes: Why are US beekeepers so derogatory about supecedure? Why is it a "problem"? If you are trying to maintain a certain line of bees in your hive - hygienic for example - the first time they supercede the trait is basically lost. (You can't raise collies if you let the mom out the back door at night.) Further, if you spend a lot of money on queens you want to get more than a couple months out of them. If you are trying to develop a healthy acclimated stock, without selecting lines, natural supercedure would be a good thing. In the pre-mite days I regarded a supercedure queen as an excellent queen if she was laying properly and the bees weren't mean. Now we are trying to raise mite-resistant bees using breeder queens and subsequent selection. pb