> Are you saying "there is no difference in queens based upon
> any factors other than whether they were maintained by
> beekeepers or researchers"?

No, no one would say anything like that.
But such questions are best sent to the authors of the paper.
If you are asking my opinion, that's clearly not what the data shows at all,
so I would not imply it.

> Also, do you agree or disagree that queens
> don't survive as long in anybody's hives?

Read the paper. The paper states:

"In recent years, queens have been failing at a high rate; with 50% or
greater of queens replaced in colonies within 6 months when historically a
queen might live one to two years."  And it gives two citations to support
this statement.

So, if you were to ask the authors of the paper, they seem to have already
answered the question "yes".

The two questions seem to express doubt that the problem as describes exists
at all.

Both Jeff and Dave have been talking about this problem for several years,
and expressing frustration at the lack of any apparent causative "outside
influence". There is no doubt in anyone's mind that the problem is
widespread and serious, hence the study at hand to see what impact
"shipping" has on the problem, as no one had any good numbers to put bounds
on it.

I realize that it is not easy to notice unless marking and tracking each and
every queen.
But it is a new and sharply noticeable problem in studies. It also shows up
in the urban core of NYC, where locally-raised queens do not mate well (or
at all), so the beekeeper must requeen manually.

(To explain, the lack of drones, due to the small number of hives, combined
with the turbulent winds due to the "skyscraper" terrain seem to be the
biggest factors, as smaller cities don't have this problem.  I can't even
get queens mated over Central Park, which is 0.5 miles by 2.5 miles, and has
many meadows, tree lines and other DCA-promoting terrain features.  So, when
a hive goes queenless or supersedes to a drone-layer in NYC, one notices.)

>> [Prior study revealed similar issues...]
>> Thus, this is NOT new.  And it's not transportation.

It is at least far more widespread now, as it is now far more common to
experience what Jerry did in his study.
In prior years queens were marked, tracked, and easily survived the period
of the majority of studies.
The traditional protocol was that the loss or supersedure of a queen during
a study prompted exclusion of any further data from that hive in the study.
More recently, keeping queens "productive and in their hives" for the
duration of the study has become a serious problem.

And of course it is not transportation - the goal here was clearly to nail
down a baseline on what the worst-case "shipping-related" impact would be,
hence the shipments in July, when a lot of producers refuse to ship.

There have been a number of posts in recent times that present apocryphal
statements from decades ago as if they were some sort of proof that things
in beekeeping are no worse now than they were then.  But theses quotes are
not accompanied by a shred of data, and the person quoted is invariably
dead, so the net effect is to be disagreeable without actually disagreeing
with anything specific .  I find the sayings of yore to be entertaining, but
of little practical value in these times of pestilence delivered by shipping
containers.

The conjugation of verbs of "beekeeping" often express nothing but the ego
of the speaker, as in "My bees are fine", "Your bees look a little weak",
"His bees are neglected", "Their bees are an utter nuisance to the entire
county".  This is non-productive, as there is no shame in knowing what is
going on with one's bees, and there should be considerable shame in engaging
in denial about problems widespread enough for long enough to become the
subject of presentations to beekeeping clubs and studies published in
peer-reviewed journals.

I'll repeat.  "Strange Days".

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