First off an apology to ALL if I sound a bit edgy in my last several post... especially to the monitor who on occasions righty 13 files my post.  In somewhat defense of myself the past 5 days of working and collecting data on about 500 hives (not my own) several hundred miles away from home have certainly taxed this old man physically.  Some task (especially working bees in poor condition) do seem to strain me psychologically.

a Mr Skoskiewicz snip... 
Because at the end of the day it's their home and no one thinks in terms  
of 'dripping chemicals' in their backyards. There's a reason why citizens  
of Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Ohio and all the other Midwestern states stay  
put.

It's an interesting thread, but let's get back to the facts and science  
and skip the scare mongering. The fact is that I want to eat a  
sun-ripened, freshly picked tomato not because it's not 'dripping  
chemicals', but because it tastes so damn good!

my comments..
Nicely said. As far as I could tell during my most recent travels there are certainly location up thru the midwest where anyone rearing queens could move away from any large 'potential' risk.   Mr Linder has pointed out the practical reason why this is not done much commercially.  There are other economic reasons (scale and market) why this may also not be so common.  As far as I can tell most midwestern commercial beekeeper move their bees south where the task of rearing queens and making 'splits' can simple be done much earlier and with a time cushion when thing go wrong.  

Certainly in my own experience I had to live in one place for quite some time before I could recognize the risk and uncertainty (related to the use of ag chemical in general) before I could decide there were places (and very close by) where I did not wish to rear bees or queens.  My default decision is that where I tend to rear bees and queens here are normally very large cattle operation where the application of chemical is fairly limited. I very intentionally keep all my bees away from the greater Brazos River bottom more due to the historic use of ag chemical than anything they use currently.  Some resides (extensively applied over decades) simply seem to persist.  As far as I can tell neonics are not even on my radar of my own concerns here concerning rearing bees or queens.

As I have stated before the folks at the Texas A&M Bee Lab have done a somewhat similar study (but not related to neonics) with a lot of the drones captured and provided by me (with students)... but this study is unpublished. This study is a bit more technically sophisticated (required a great deal more than a lighted microscope) and I suspect the analysis once published will not totally coincide with my own determination as to what was happening in regards to drone semen viability.

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