Not trying to throw stones at any industry, and for the benefit of all would love to be proven wrong.  Just wond'ring aloud (with apologies to Jethro Tull).



Mp, has been a anti package guy for a long time.  He also advocates overwintering nucs,  but wait!  There not really nucs,  its an 8 frame unit that’s vertical.....

My point being hes 1 voice.  Of a few of course,  but by in large hes way off base.  The  yearly average for packages is just over 1/2  million packages.  The large portion of those going to commercial beekeepers.  If the package quality was that bad they wouldn't buy them.
The hobbiest  buy the other half,  and if unfortunately they are good at killing off bees, and then posting blogs about poor quality.

It should be noted for the last 5 years I personaly have been testing a lot of queens, locals, purebreds, and production queens.  There are no discernable trends I can see.  Looks a lot to me like a good queen is a lot more about some unknown quality issue, than where they came from.(but that’s a side note not intended to fire up a debate on what the quality is)


If you should read ABC and XYZ  you would find that packages quite often supercede good queens due to lack of brood pheromones.  This was know in the 1940,  long before internet wizards found it.

Its also interesting to note,  while there have always been "local queen" fanatics,  pre varro,  it was a darn rare discussion.  And it does appear that jury is still out for most people.

Its always easy to blame queens and others for problems.  But lets deal with reality for a moment.  If you wanted to start beekeeping, and the only choice was local bees, how many would get started?  The real answer is darn few. Now,  there is absolutely nothing wrong with local bees, nucs or queens, except supply.  Canada has the same problem.  Long cold winters do not allow for both honey production and rapid expansion.   Were Canada to not import packages,  the bee industry would die off quickly.   Whats interesting is that many tout MP methods as the cure,  hes one guy,  and thousands of Canadian beeks have not figured out how to do it the same way successfully.  Maybe they can at some point,  maybe not.  Bottom line is As a country the want/need more bees than they have.


Now what it does for the US,  yup  bee package prices will jump. And that’s a good thing for US and beekeepers.  A few million more dollars going into our economy.  Most are just ticked cause a package will now cost 25.00 more....  so what??  Either you want bees or you don't.  one can always wait for those free local swarms!

Right now or northern neighbors are stuck.  They can't enjoy a free market like us.  They have to buy from one source,  last I heard it was around 190 Canadian dollars for a package.  All that money going somewhere else,  mostly to shipping companies.

What would happen in your state, if you were only allowed to get bees from one place??  

Seems to me guys like MP would be glad to see all those packages headed north,  not saturating the  local drone populations.

Its not fair or right to try to envoke protectionist issues for nonsensical reasons.  Where would we be without our morning coffee??  Or  some of that imported honey to add to it??

Charles

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