So shipment did not
produce the effect seen by beekeepers, where it seems that few hives can
keep a queen an entire season, and by researchers, where it seems that few
queens can keep laying long enough to complete a study.




In the mid-1970s, I performed a large experiment in Helena, MT.  All of the colonies were established from packages delivered by a commercial beekeeper who re-stocked every spring.  He'd fly his plane to CA to oversee the packing, then he had a reefer haul the hives back to Wolf Point.  He dropped off 65 packages to me in Helena and his crew helped us hive them - so the bees were all in their new homes in less than 1 hr, and had been packaged the day before.

We marked the queens and did frequent inspections.  This was before varroa.  About 28% of the colonies replaced their queens before end of that summer.

 We wrote the study up as a technical report to EPA, who funded it.  The queen loss was equivalent across controls, treatments, etc.  It did not correlate with treatment.

Now here's the kicker.  I was NOT ABLE to publish the study in any of the bee journals - the reviewers assumed that the high queen loss was my fault - poor management.  They all believed that queens were good for 2-3 years, anything else had to be the fault of the beekeeper.

Translation - they'd never marked queens for a longitudinal study.  About the same time, Jim Bach, the WA State Apiculture Inspector started seeing the same problem of queen failures and replacements.  It took him several years to get anyone to pay attention.

Thus, this is NOT new.  And it's not transportation - the reefer kept the packages cool and he had good ventilation.  I didn't see anything else that sophisticated until I saw Ray Olivarez's trucks for package delivery a few years ago.

Jerry



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