> Irrespective of any underlying colony selection mechanisms, one simple way is to graft far more than you need and select/cull heavily for whatever traits you are selecting for. ... I am fairly new to grafting and queen rearing but that has worked for me so far.

Well, I am not new to grafting, having learnt to do it back in the 1970s. I am not sure what you are trying to say here. If you have hundreds of queen cells all from the same queen and probably from the same drone, all raised the same way, you are already working with too small of a subset to get decent variation. 

Then, how will you test them? In nucs? A queen would have to be allowed to develop her own colony and it would have to be monitored for several seasons, before you had any criteria with which to "judge her". 

Then what? Will you graft from her, expecting all the colonies that *those* queens produce to be similar to the one that she produced, even though these new queens will mate with entirely different drones and *their* offspring will only be somewhat related to the workers of the original colony. 

The point is, queen rearing as it is practiced today is a method for mass production of queens from the same stock, which may or may not be a recipe for getting the best sorts of colonies. I'm just saying.

PLB

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