"in 1993-1994 and in 2004-2005, U.S. commercial queen producers self-reported the production of close to 1 million queens for sale from around 600 and 500 queen "mothers," respectively "

I do not doubt the data.  But, a lot of queens are bred that are not in this data.  I know of one breeder who produces over 500 II queens a year.  Some are for his own use of course.  But he makes his living selling breeder queens so he alone would account for a good portion of the total queen mothers if those in the survey were the only queen mothers used.  We all know that is not correct.  Plus, those one million queens produced mate with some 12 or 15 million drones.  That does not sound a bit like a genetic bottleneck to me.  That is roughly the same genetic bottleneck that exists in Holstein cattle today due to the small number of bulls used to produce semen.  And it is well understood that even small amounts of inbreeding in Holsteins results in significant loss in milk production.  The last figure I heard was 1% inbreeding (a Wright calculation for those interested) resulted in a 1% lower milk production.  I have yet to hear any evidence that suggests to me we are suffering a bit from inbreeding suppression in honey bees. If anything we have insufficient genetic selection in my opinion judging by the usual wide range of performance seen from a batch of queens.

Dick

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