May a lowly sideliner/hobbyist put her oar in here? We are finding we can breed, even on a small scale and without access to special lines, much better bees than we can buy. We don't need to wait, or have special equipment/genes.

I have been beekeeping for 10 years, and worked my way through the Apprentice/Journeyman/Master Beekeeper stream that is a wonderful feature of USA beekeeping.

Most of my fellow club members are hobbyists or small sideliners like myself. We are fortunate to have a good sprinkling of great science + critical thinking backgrounds in our membership. And a big focus for us is helping our new beekeepers out with good advice suited to our area. As a membership, as a small tribe of small beekeepers, we have found that whatever breeding is done to produce the packages our new beekeepers depend on to get their start, it doesn't seem to have our needs in mind.

So much so, and after the 2016 season, in which bought queens/package queens went AWOL at an incredible rate, throwing our new USA adb Canadian member beekeepers in at the very deep and very expensive end of the pool (new packages in Canada were running at $200 that year, and are pushing toward $250 now...I realize that is $0.75 in US$ (just kidding! inside cross border club joke)...but in any case our new beekeepers were having all kinds of trouble with vanishing queens, finding that out too late and ending up with hopeless drone layer colonies late in the year. Unacceptable!!! Overwintering, awful. Honey harvest, ditto.

Some are always understandably inept and lose or crush their queens and manage...like newbees. I sure did back in the day and still manage to make epic mistakes. But failure rates were wayyyy higher than normal, and with the "save the bees" media message fading, we were seeing a more careful suite of new beekeepers, more prepared and attentive. FWIW the supercedure rate of the New Zealand package queens is supposed to be 60% in their first season. I don't think our USA sourced packages are doing any better. That is tough on new beekeepers. 

Across the membership, we had tried expensive sourced bees and local bees, with disastrous results. Experiences we had when sourcing new queens were uniformly disappointing, we think due to most purchased queens we found being started in nucs as emergency queens. We do have a very few good queen breeders out there and also locally but to a large extent they are breeding for themselves and often have no queens for sale.

We have also found issues with sourced queens that are shipped, probably due to temperature extremes (high and/or low) during shipment affecting their fertility. 

Armed with advice from mentors, including Jerry and Randy, we began an in-club, multi-year queen breeding project in 2017.  Good queens are really labour intensive to produce, so much so that I have gone from being shocked they cost $40 in 2017 to being shocked they do not cost $100. Which may at least partially explain package queen issues.

Our sense is that our local queens are only better because we raise them from our best colonies, carefully and well. It is not due to some magical effect of having been bred locally or from esoteric stock. There a ton of locally bred queens out there that are worthless. On top of that concern, in our own queen breeding, we found that queen quality in any batch of cells followed ye olde Bell curve...a few were terrible, most were ok, and a few were rock stars....and they are all created locally.

Over time we will see genetic drift toward bees that prosper in our very chilly, wet winters here in the PacNW. But right off the top we need to identify colonies and queens that winter well and boom in the spring, so they are ready to capitalize on our brief blackberry flow in June.

The problem for small holding beekeepers (well, all beekeepers) is: raising enough queens to identify and keep and breed from those rock stars. They need to be proofed, so you can breed from your best. It takes a cooperative to pull that off, usually involving someone(s) with a big enough beeyard, time, and budget to share the results. And attention needs to be paid to local drone numbers and quality as well, because we are deliberately depending on wild matings. A pox upon universal drone sacrifice!

But all that work and expense is worth it if for no other reason than that commercially bred queens are for all the reasons cited above, and perhaps a few more, not coming up to the mark. The good news is: better local bees are not technically very difficult to achieve.

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