Hi Dee

> So getting back then, to thoughts prior, if factory
> farming and factory queens are for artificialized
> hybrid crops by man's doing and not Nature, then why
> isn't real queen breeding taught to sideliners and
> hobbyists so they know the difference ... 

How do you define 'real queen breeding' and 'factory queens'?  Over on this side of the Atlantic there are very few queens bought by sideliners and hobbyists, and not that many by commercial operators either.  Quite a few hobby beekeepers make no selection at all and just rely on local queens and drones, whereas many select colonies to breed from and some control drones in some way too.  Amongst hobby or small-scale beekeepers, a variety of queen raising methods are used - from colony splits to multiple nucs from swarming colonies to queen cell distribution to grafting a few hundred larvae into cell raising colonies.  All of these are done by hobby beekeepers and sideliners, continuing a craft that goes back to the invention of moveable frames and, in the case of selection of stocks, to the beginnings of apiculture itself.

Surely in the US you have the same spread of approaches, even if the availability of packages and commercial queens makes 'off-the-shelf' beekeeping more common.  So what makes one approach 'real' or natural (moveable frames are certainly not natural) and another 'factory'?

all the best

Gavin

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