a Charles Linder snip...
I am a bit surprised,  no one has addressed my question of if the repeated "requeening" is part of our issues with queens lasting les time?   Does the constant selection of newer younger queens lead us away from a genetic goal of longer lived queens??

my comments...
This is exactly my concern in trying to rear treatment free bees.  Basically you are selecting for longevity and allow natural selection to do the culling.  As far as selecting from your most productive bees and splitting from these.... this may work better at larger scale.  On a smaller scale this may lead to some serious inbreeding and in my early experience in keeping bees (West Virginia) this did on a fairly short time scale lead to some pretty mean bees.

of course this question of the proper balance beween inbreeding and outbreeding regimes is the bases of selection and breeding lines of honeybees.
  

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