>>>Italian thoroughbreds<<<

Strictly speaking regarding those bees sold as "Italian", wouldn't the
term "Italian thoroughbreds" qualify as an "oxymoron"?

>>>. Look at a map of North/Central Calif. where the queens are produced
and you will see that all the producers are in the general area.<<<

This makes no allowance for topography, etc. and also assumes that the
mating yards are at the same location as the business mailing address or
shipping point and there is nothing to say that they couldn't differ as
well.  Most outfits probably are in that scenario but it is my
understanding that a few producers, mostly of Carniolans, use(d) fairly
isolated yards and drone saturation to keep the percentage of "correct"
drones per mated queen up.  I think you need to keep production queens
and breeder queens in the proper perspective.  Breeder queens are rarely
naturally mated and often are not even produced by the typical commercial
queen breeder.

FWIIW, probably the "biggest" producer of open mated breeder queens in
North America had to be the "Hastings Carniolans".  As I understand it,
the mating yards were so far north in Saskatchewan that there just
weren't any feral populations or other beekeepers for miles to the south
of their location.  I think the natural selection pressure this put on
drones gave those breeder queens "a leg up" that AI can never duplicate.
All things are relative, memories tend to be biased toward one extreme or
the other, but I don't think the current "Carniolans" regardless of
source are the equal of the "Hastings strain" as produced by breeder
queens from north of the "Birch Hills".

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