>Could we freeze bees eggs and store them until we had progeny tested the queen?  I have no idea, but the idea seems interesting to me. 

Dick, Dr. Brandon Hopkins at WSU has in the last several years perfected the method of cryopreservation of honeybee semon and they have established a repository both at WSU in Pullman and at the national lab in Ft. Collins. Acording to him the preservation of eggs is not at this time practicle or in fact as valuable since the more pure version of a queens genetics is exsressed in her drones. They have successfully inported old world seman and by the process of II and back breeding can come very close to reproducing the original strain. Using the semon and an unrelated queen you get 50% the first round. With the same semon and the daughter queen you get 75% the second round. Then 87.5%, 93.75% and so on. Up to 5 generations are possible in a single year. So far this method is beeing used to bring additional genitic diversity to our commercial breeding stocks from areas outside the US where importation of live queens or bees is baned. The potential for improving domestic stock is also great. We no longer need to lose outstanding individual genetics from a queen with valuable traits. By preserving semon from her drones we can indefinately keep her qualities and use them in II breeding into the future. We can also keep combined semon fron "lines" of distintive bees and not risk the loss of well developed strains as has recently happened with a long established Laidlaw line.

This program is still young but the potential I believe is great.

Paul Hosticka
Dayton WA

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