Hello Aaron & All,
Hopefully in the coming weeks I will get time to answer some of Peter's
questions about the ABF convention. I apologize for not being able to spend
the time right now.

Interesting points Aaron has posted an I can not really argue with his
position as is the position of most researchers. I will add the other side
of the coin for the discussion.

Aaron said:
But yes, breeding your own queens is a better solution.  However
you still have the open mating issue and the possibility of bad wine.
Raising your own and practicing II, the ultimate solution!

The above is OK for the small beekeeper which has time and wants to play
queen breeder. For the industry Allen is going in the right direction (in my
opinion).

Many of my beekeeper friends in Texas, Alabama  and Florida do raise their
own queens for their operations. We have raised a huge number of queens in
south Texas while hives were still buried in snow banks in Missouri..

Raising early queens will not work for us in Missouri as we simply can't get
mature drones early enough and mating conditions are less than ideal at the
time we need queens.

There are reasons ( to numerous to post now) why overwintering young queens
from the fall before will not work for us. Overwintering queens works for
others and I endorse the idea but we have had better luck in spring raising
queens.  Raising queens in spring is natural for bees.

 Many times we have to get queens  from a area (Hawaii) because they are
simply the only place we can get queens as early as we need the queens. I
was opposed to using Hawaiian queens at first for the reasons Tim said but
we have had good luck with the Hawaiian queens.

Open mating:

Open mating is here to stay. With a queen mating in the air high above the
hives there simply is not another way for production queens. The old bee
books are full of methods tried unsuccessfully to get queens to mate in
small cages.   A few beekeepers actually claimed success but were later
disproved.

One can instrumentally inseminate ( II ) to improve your breeder queens BUT
the best production queens I have ever used came from the breeder queen
selection process used by the old  queen raiser families.

II queens are good for the purpose intended. To introduce certain traits
into your production stock. All our II breeder queens but one (A Marla
Spivak II queen which lasted four years from which thousands of daughters
were raised)  have been short lived. We actually took the Marla Spivak II
queen from the coffin hive and set her up in a normal hive and she lived
another year before she was superceded ( out of kindness I suppose and we
felt she deserved to live out a normal life for her service).

We use a long coffin type hive to reduce the brood laying area many times to
prolong the longevity.  A apiary made up of entirely II mated queens would
only work for  a small queen breeder. Many of our queen breeders raise
150,000 queens a year and although the people at the top are very
knowledgeable those actually producing , evaluating and caging the queens
for shipment are simply working too fast to give the queens the proper
selection. If they see eggs in the cage she goes.

Keep on posting Aaron you have been silent for awhile. Maybe you have been
on R&R like Keith!

Bob