?deknow said:
>For those interested, you can see a short video of Randy Quinn (who did 
>much of the field work for these lines) talking a bit about his experiences 
>and thoughts:

I watched the video several times.

Very little of his presentation focused on the actual project and from the 
talk I gather Randy worked mainly on the Starline side doing field work. 
Inbred lines are always hard to maintain which Randy pointed out. His 
description of the lines involved fits what I have been told by Dr. Larry 
Conner at many times over the years both in presentations and in personal 
conversations.
So I would say the *general information* shared on the lines was correct.

From there Randy lost me with his condemning all yellow bees { my favorite 
bee) as a scourge and small cell as the answer to why Russian bees are not 
doing as well as they did in Russia in the U.S..( my experience with 
hundreds of Russian/Russian queens was that the bees performed in the U.S. 
exactly as they did in Russia on our comb but I do not use the 5.4 comb but 
the Pierco which is closer to 5.1 mm/ 5.2 mm.
The whole small cell issue is confusing. My experiments with small cell have 
not shown an improvement in varroa control but Dee says I did my experiments 
wrong and did not keep trying. My bees made a mess of my small cell comb but 
I did get some drawn by getting drawn in the middle of the brood nest at the 
height of spring brood raising. Maybe one day the small cell issue will be 
proved one way or the other.

I am a person which looks at the total picture of beekeeping.

Always the forest and not just the trees.

The scope of the Starline & Midnight project even at its peak was not even a 
percent of the queens being used in the U.S.. They were not being used by 
commercial beekeepers to change traits as much as too improve in areas the 
commercial beekeeper wanted too improve. Mainly in the area of honey 
production and brood production.

Being around at the same time as Randy I read and heard many of the reasons 
why the lines were superior over the mass produced queens from breeders 
simply selected by queen breeder observation. I have no problem with the 
observation style breeder selection but there can be quite a bit of variance 
in the queens.

With the Starlines and to a lesser degree with the Midnights the hives in 
the yard all seemed to move into a higher degree of production. Bud Cale 
claimed an increase in production around 30% due to mainly hybrid vigor and 
traits maintained in the inbred lines displayed in the offspring.

The main drawback was having to buy queens in order to maintain the hybrid 
vigor. *In my experience* the yard as a whole returned fast to simply the 
production found in queens from regular sources *if* you did not keep buying 
queens. The replacement hive raised (swarming or supercedure) Midnight 
queens were quite nasty and I put a hive tool to many. The only reaction 
from bee stings I ever had came from one of those supercedure Midnight queen 
headed hives. In the early years of the program the honey production and 
explosive hive size of the hives headed by Midnights and Starline queens was 
easy to see by visitors to my hives.

The Midnights would expand fast in spring when fresh pollen arrived and make 
some of the most beautiful comb honey I ever produced with a white wax. We 
made comb honey with the Midnights.

The Starlines would produce around two supers of honey more than most the 
other queens I used. Both lines wintered well.

I moved into trying the Weaver "Buckfast" as the Florida project was slowing 
down and beekeepers were moving away from the Midnight and starline queens. 
Quality was the simple reason for beekeepers moving in another direction and 
Dr. Larry Conner (head of the project at the end) has said at presentations 
many times the help failed to maintain the quality of the inbred lines which 
resulted in poor queens.

I was disappointed in the Buckfast lines of the Weavers as the queens were 
not really buckfast but simply an "All American "( Weaver U.S. line) 
inseminated with Buckfast semen or in other words a cross. Tolerant of the 
tracheal mite but not near the bees the Starline and Midnight queens had 
produced!

When talk of a Russian bee import came up researchers involved said that 
many had wished the actual "Buckfast" queens had been imported instead of 
only semen for the Buckfast line. So it was decided to import the actual 
queens from Russia which would give the Russian queen breeders what they 
needed to maintain a pure Russian/Russian line in the U.S.. Again the long 
range thinking of Dr. Shiminuki!

Enough for now!

Happy New Year to All!

bob

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