" at this point in beekeeping  we still cannot judge a queen until shes either dead,  or been laying in a hive for 6 months....  I complete understand the difficulty,"

I know I can not tell a thing about a new queen.  By the time she has over wintered in a nuc I think I can get some idea about her.  After a summer in a production hive I have a good idea about her value.

Now think about it from the commercial queen producers view point.  I know darned well he wants to produce a good product.  He would love it if every queen he made was great.  But, the poor devil does not really have great ways to pick what to breed from.  The queen he really wants to breed from is not always the queen that is herself a great performer.  What he wants are great daughters.  By the time daughters are tested so that he can judge the real value of the queen as a breeder that queen is likely gone.  In truth I doubt if any queen breeders really know how daughters from one queen end up comparing to daughters of other queens.

The dairy industry faced this exact type of problem back in the 1930s and 40s.  A bit different with cattle as a cow can only produce a small number of offspring but the bull can produce a lot.  Still, there may be lessons.  What happened in the dairy industry was progeny testing bulls.  A bull was used to produce some number of off spring and the heifers were rated on improved performance compared to what was expected on average from the various dams.  Performance was measured by such things as butter fat and milk production in pounds and qualitative things like udder quality.  And the whole time testing was going on semen was frozen for possible future use.  In most cases when testing was done that frozen semen was discarded.  But, the occasional bull proved to consistently produce outstanding daughters and his semen was used for AI.

How effective was care in picking good bulls?   When I took Ag in high school I learned the average dairy cow in Iowa at that time produced 175 pounds of butter fat a year.  That was about 1957.   My dad had used AI since the late 40s.  At that time any first calf heifer that did not produce 400 pounds of butter fat her first year went to the sales barn.   Today my dads best cows would be culls.

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

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