>
> >In my opinion, the best queens are hatched in the hive they will be
> heading, and anything else is a compromise.


Allen, I heartily concur!  In my experience, I have greater queen
survivability with those queens that remain with the nuc colony in which she
mated, than with those that I receive in the mail, and successfully
introduce (introduction is apparently not the problem).

I'm not sure if this is due to the fact that I don't work queen nucs into
singles until the queen has been laying for a while, or whether it is
because the queens that I received in the mail simply weren't tested for a
long enough period.

When one is raising queens, a certain proportion will start laying, then
fail in short order.  If queens are pulled and shipped upon commencement of
laying, the buyer will experience those failures.  I would hesitate to blame
the queen producer, since some degree of failure is beyond his control.

Randy Oliver

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