> I am not sure what you are trying to say here. 
>If you have hundreds of queen cells all from the same queen and probably from the same drone, all raised the same way, you are already working with too small of a subset to get decent variation. 

Hi.
I suppose the point I am trying to make is that a hobby beekeeper like myself will end up with much better bees if some attempt is made at queen rearing and selection as opposed to letting the bees swarm and make queens at random. Perhaps that is stating the obvious, but many amateur beekeepers seem to do just that.
Variation can be good or bad. Good when you are not losing the genetics you want to keep in your population but bad when you get crosses with drones from other bee subspecies in your open mated queens.
There are many variables which are obvious and can appear within weeks of a queen mating which can be taken into account when selecting; hybridization with a different sub-species, appearance of chalk brood, aggression, runniness on the comb, poor brood pattern etc.

But yes, a lot of factors such as hardiness or honey production clearly take longer to evaluate and the process will really only work if you  work together with your beekeeping neighbours through an association or a breeding group.

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