>A reciprocal cross - Carniolan queens mated with
>drones of other races - produces very often a bad tempered bee and at the
same time a first-cross of little or no economic value.

The Italian bee still is the most used bee in the U.S. by both the
commercial and hobby beekeeper.

The use of carniolans is on the rise and I believe Richard Adee is working
closely with Sue C. and has been using carniolans  over the last decade
(possibly longer). Horace Bell uses Italians and both beekeepers run similar
numbers of colonies so I would guess the Italians are still the most used
race of bee in the U.S..

Crosses of Italian and Carniolan are common in the U.S.

 I have used a carniolan/ Italian mix from a beekeeper in Texas (which does
not advertise or sell to the general public) which we call "stripers"
because of their unusual markings. The markings are different, easily
recognizable and consistent through a batch of queens and from consistent
from year to year.

Two of my friends have used a hundred queens a week from the beekeeper with
excellent results. One friend swears by the "stripers" as the best bee he
ever used! I had no problems with the "striper" queens I used  but I only
installed about 50 queens over the last decade and paid little attention to
the cross but would have noticed low honey production, heavy swarming
tendecies and aggressive behavior.
. I would be my friends house and he would have several battery boxes of
queens waiting for installation ( from different queen breeders) and I
needed only 10 or so queens and did not have time to wait on a shipment.
Most times I replaced the queens with queens from my next shipment.

All I was ever able to find out about those "striper" queens were they were
a direct cross of Italian and carniolan.
The color was a very dark brown with unusual jet black markings. The stripes
were wider if i remember correctly and there was not a black tip at the
bottom like many Buckfast queens in the U.S. have got.

Bob

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