>Are you telling me there just going to open the south border to half
>cocked, tex-mex , hive beetle breeder hives with none of the concerns from
>our bees?

Hive beetle will not stop entry into Texas or  Arizona . Nor fire ants.

> Tell me if the aussie queens dry up ,where I can get large numbers  in
> short notice?

Aussie queens have been handy. More reliable than Kona but the California
queen breeders say we will be fine without our 500 queen lots of Aussie
queens.

>You used to be able to do that with Kona , but now there booked, sold out
>and getting on a waiting list means very little to being able to call up
>and have queens in less than a week if you need them to make up unexpected
>loss.

Unexpected loss? Looks like you will have to stop having unexpected loss (
kidding David!) , or order from Kona the year before ( like we do) or raise
your own queens.( like David Miska & Kirk Jones)
We can't raise ours as we do not have mature drones early enough but you
should?

What we do is place a larger order than we need the year before for the
earliest date possible. When they arrive we place the queens in five frame
nucs with honey and a frame of brood. In cold weather they can sit for up to
a month before needing moved to a single. That way we have always got queens
if needed.
A week or two later our increase queens arrive and we make splits up ahead 
of
time for these.

>In my experience, there seems to be a shortage for sure of queens ,and the
>prices seem to reflect it's a sellers market.

Shortage only happens in my opinion when hives are crashing in the U.S.. and
when beeks want early queens. Once queen producers get lined out they can
crank out huge numbers of queens if good mating weather.Packages were in
short supply last spring.
Place an order with Kona the year before and I think you will be treated
better. Gus takes good care of his regular customers but like you say a
couple years ago the only place we could get queens was from the Aussies.

>I for one would welcome some new gene's.

> to the basically closed gene pool we have had here for decades,with the
> exception of some Yugo's , russians, and aussie stock.

How are those new introduction scutellata genes working out? World record
honey production came from Scuts!

bob

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