Hello James & All,

James said:
For the record, on local selection rather than importing bees, we often have
3rd year queens out-producing 1st year queens - in fact my best producing
queen ever was 3 years old - over 200lb
the colony had also produced massive amounts of brood as well. I now have a
good strain in this apiary and it is my preferred mating site.

Prolific is a good quality and perhaps the reason why the colony did as good
as it did.

 Murray M. also talks of using old queens which surprises me as most
commercial beekeepers prefer young queens because research has proven beyond
a shadow of a doubt they are less prone to swarm all thing being equal over
a three year old queen.

Commercial beekeepers also prefer young queens as three year old queens  can
and do many times become drone layers in their third year due to being
poorly mated in inclimate conditions (kind of like the weather in Georgia,
U.S.A. and England in spring.)

The commercial beekeeper has time invested, meds bought and installed and
when the queen becomes a drone layer or the hive becomes queenless then the
hive becomes a liability. The situation worsens when the hive is invaded by
wax moths before picked up by the beekeeper.

Queens are the heart of the colony!

 In the early seventies Roger Morse ( author 1979 book titled "Rearing Queen
Honey Bees") asked James Powers, owner  of Power apiaries inc. ,which
operated 34,000 hives of bees in five U.S. states and was considered the
largest bee operation in the world at the time why he raised his own queens
and did not buy queens.

James Powers  answer taken from the preface of the above book:

"Queen rearing is too important a task to leave to someone else".

As far as an  open mating area James you really need to control the drones
for ten miles in all directions for  close to perfect  drone control. The
main reason instrumental insemination is popular with queen breeders.

I am getting some production queens this year which are being open mated by
a California noted beekeeper/queen breeder in the middle of a 2500 acre
ranch which has no other bee hives around. Not perfect but a decent effort
at open mating drone control as the area of the mating yards is being
flooded with the drones of choice.

Until I was contacted by the above beekeeper which believes the same as I do
I thought I was going to have to produce what I want as the queens I am
looking for are simply not available from the present group of U.S. queen
breeders.

I still am going to do the project I explained to James with the Russian
bees. In other words it takes two seasons to get the stock to raise Russian
bees and I am not even sure Russian bees is what I am looking for but
willing to try and see after all the work the Baton rouge Bee lab has put
into the project.

 I do not know how well the Russians produce honey as only going into my
second year with Russians. The drought (worse in a 100 years in our area)
made it hard to judge honey production. Those which swear by the Russian
bees honey production  are selling Russian breeders. I need to see for
myself. I have found a friend off of BEE-L ( a lurker) which is going to
help me learn what I need to raise quality queens, evaluate queens and
hopefully teach me to do instrumental insemination.  He has offered.

 I will say the Russian hives I looked at today seemed to winter well *but*
so did the Italians,  the carniolans and the Italian/ carniolan hybrids I
looked at.

Maybe wintering has more to do with the beekeeper than the strain of bees?

Bob

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