Hi Bob & All,

> What have our U.S. queen breeders came up with in the same period of time?
>

It is up to individuals like us to breed the bees we are looking for, all
beekeepers should obtain the knowledge to execute the task. !!! Some people
think it should be the job of commercial queen breeders to do this but I
think that the Beekeeping community will be better off if beekeepers pick up
the ball and start playing ball. In other words beekeepers should act like
beekeepers and do the work. Much more can be accomplished if every body was
working together. Rearing and mating queens should be common beekeeping
practice and simply fundamental beekeeping 101, but new beekeepers are not
being encouraged in this manner.

I have personally been impressed by the Russian Queen Project even though
the queens I have been evaluating are crosses with my queen suppliers own
stock. These Russian/cross bees produced more honey last season than other
strains used and wintered better than others also. Like you I would like to
evaluate the pure Russian in the environment I keep bees in. The only way I
can see doing it and afford to do so is by breeding Russians myself by
producing Russian daughters from an A.I. breeder queen and mating them with
the drones of pure Russian queens that I received from my queen supplier. My
supplier gets his breeder queens from Glenn Apiaries and open mates with his
stock and has been doing this for three years now. I have to get this A.I.
Breeder so the daughters I produce are pure and mate with the last years
daughters drones so I have drone material that has wintered in my
environment. I have an advantage up here because it is relatively easy for
me to isolate mating yards.

It has been my experience that it is hard to get all beekeepers to cooperate
for the overall good of keeping bees. There are a few here and there that do
see the benefits of cooperation but all it takes is one beekeeper in an area
that requires cooperation to skew the final results. I am sure that there
are production queen producers that would like to produce open mated
Russian/Russian queens but realize that trying to would require total
cooperation from neighboring apiaries. I see it as not being the individual
queen producers fault if he can not produce R/R queens like we would like to
obtain. That being the case we must pursue obtaining R/R queens on our own
the best way we can. Again I have been so impressed by the Russian/crosses I
have used that I plan on rearing and mating R/R queens for myself, this is
the only way I can see that I can be sure that I will have R/R queens that
are open mated with pure R/R drones.

 . ..   Keith Malone, Chugiak, Alaska USA, http://www.cer.org/,
c(((([ , Apiarian, http://takeoff.to/alaskahoney/,
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Norlandbeekeepers/ ,
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ApiarianBreedersGuild/

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