>I'm letting the queen breeders do the hard selection work, then I use this year's best performers for queen mothers and most of the rest I just allow to raise drones; what I'm seeing is that by "raising the floor" as Paul well stated, I don't generally mind the drone pool that I end up with.>

Monk, that is what I started doing as well, and yes it is slow but does gradually yield benefits. It is easy to breed from your best queens, drone area health is another issue. After widespread package queen failures a few years ago and the increase of foulbrood infections in the area we are trying to do what we can to fill local bee needs with local bees, while attempting to improve local stock via a low-tech, easy to replicate method.

To do what we can on the drone topic, we have asked all local beekeepers and club members to stop using drone sacrifice as an IPM method (heck, it just selects for Varroa that preferentially infest worker brood anyway...is a huge drain on colony resources and depopulates the local DCA's) and to push drone production in their best colony (assuming they have more than one colony, choose the best). You can do that by installing shallow frames in a deep so the bees draw drone comb off the bottom of that frame or by inserting a green drone frame, then supplementing that colony while it raises the drone larvae.

Locally we try not to do queen breeding when the banks of mobile bees are in town, hoping thereby to breed to the local drones, not the annual crop of Hawaii/New Zealand drones. Also hoping that the mobile bees either do not have a lot of drones and/or those drones are not as fit as the local boys.

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