Add my voice to those that doubt self reported causes of colony failure are, pick one... poor queens, CCD, neonicks, beekeepers that don't treat, beekeepers that do treat, genetic bottlenecks, on and on. With out actual verifiable evidence self reported surveys are just as likely to lead us astray as help find a cause, IMHO. We would do better to closely fallow the methods and conditions of a few selected beekeepers than rely on an amalgamation of thousands of self reports from unknown sources.

Dick's opinion that a queen will lay fertilized eggs until she doesn't seems logical to my untrained mind. Is there any evidence that the quality of the sperm can degrade resulting in poor but viable off-spring? A couple of my observations regards his post though. I often see queens that were laying well and leading a large productive colony come out of winter as drone layers. Maybe 2 or 3% each spring. I suspect that due to the sudden change, that it is not depletion of sperm but some factor coincidental with the 10 to 12 week lay-over. Maybe sperm death or some physiological problem? Sometimes the queen is present in spring but not laying at all.I do occasionally see a lone drone cell in a field of capped worker cells and have never given it much notice or took it as an indicator of a failing queen. I believe that a queen that is failing due to sperm depletion during the season is most often superceded before I notice although I have seen late season increase in drone brood where it should not be and usually the queen is already gone. 

My anecdotal experience after raising my own queens for 25 years is that good husbandry is the key. I am not so foolish as to believe that I can select better breeders or that I have superior skills. What prompted my trying my hand at it was the too frequent early supercedures of the Calif. queens I was getting via the mail in small lots of 5 to 20. By simply paying close attention to all the steps from crafting to cell builder to mating nuc the problem of early supercedure went away. It is rare that a queen is not accepted of fails in her first year. Most go 2 years and some 3 or more. They are not banked and go straight from their mating nuc to new colony in a matter of hours. I no longer replace a queen only due to her age. I saw 2 white queens this morning. There is always some variation in yield in a given yard and I cull the laggards. Otherwise I can not say that I have seen a change in historic production that is not caused by seasonal availability of forage and weather. 

The question of shipping is getting a lot of deserved attention and I hope that some additional real research goes into it but my fear is that it will become the latest scapegoat with a lot of beekeepers claiming that their failures are due to UPS or USPS. Along with Charlie I'm quite certain it ain't us.

Paul Hosticka
Dayton WA

    

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