> Open mated is a crap shoot, I do not think so. Honey bees for eons have > been mating in the open to create the variability that gives breeders > today the material they use to manipulate the genetics for the good or > bad. True. If your goal is a diverse gene pool, a real primordial soup of genes, then open mating is ideal to keep everything, the good and the bad all mixed up. If diversity is the sole goal, then open mating ideally serves the goal. It is highly doubtful that the super bee will be a mutt. Possible, but not likely. It will more likely be and in fact IS the result of a concerted effort by breeders and/or researchers to isolate the good from the bad in a gene pool of all mixed up qualities. The researchers and breeders work for generations (bee generations, not people generations) to repeatedly isolate the best of the good, and strive to pass the best of the best on to the next generations. After a lot of work and many generations of isolating the good and culling the bad, breeders arrive at a lineage that has tested positively to possess the quality sought, be it SMR or HYG or AFB resistance, whatever. It is this proven lineage that is sold for BIG bucks to the producers. If the producers are good producers, they successfully maintain that lineage, that bred for trait, the results of all the work put into it by the researchers and breeders. If the producers are good producers they will deliver this lineage in the product they sell. The super beekeeper will ask of their producers, "What are they doing to maintain the lineage of their breeder stock?" A weak answer will be drone saturation (flooding mating areas with drones of superior lineage similar to their breeder queens). A better answer will be continued assays to evaluate the progeny of their breeder queens, keeping only the good and culling the bad. It's not a trivial exercise to isolate all these good qualities and it is very easy to lose them. SMR is heritable across generations but can be lost. HYG is recessive. Genetic diversity is a safeguard against inbreeding, and THAT is the evolutionary advantage to open mating. What you need is open mating that maintains genetic diversity while maintaining the desired quality of the lineage that has been delivered by the breeders to the producers. Unfortunately, open mating is more likely to dilute the lineage, not strengthen it. It's Catch 22! A good analogy can be found in the wine industry. There are hundreds, no, thousands of wild yeasts, any of which will ferment grape juice. Centuries of isolating the yeasts that produce good tasting wine from the yeasts that produce swill have resulted in a comparatively small set of yeast cultures that are actually used in vineyards. A vintner wouldn't dream of chancing a harvest to any old wild yeast (although there is a hugely diverse gene pool of wild yeasts out there any one of which will do the job). Open mating queens is like trusting a vineyard's harvest to wild yeast. Getting back to the distinction between breeder and producer, I don't mean to put words in Dr. Spivak's mouth, but I interpreted in what she said a growing frustration that all the work being done to bring great qualities to the forefront, the successes in producing the so called super bee are quickly being lost at a level higher than the end user. Researchers HAVE isolated bees who can stand the ravages of V.d. They HAVE isolated qualities to resist AFB. It's been done repeatedly. The frustration is in that the qualities isolated at the research level are not making it to the beekeeper level. Where is it lost and who is responsible for making sure it not be is a current debate. Perhaps it IS the producers who are accountable. In writing this I am starting to convince myself that is where the blame should lie. I'd like to think that at least SOME producers ARE delivering what they advertise, but I can't say with confidence who they are. And I still believe that some of the responsibility, a LOT of the responsibility lies with the consumer, precisely because they have bought an open mated queen. In a lot of 50 or 100 queens, I expect at least a few duds. Assembly line production of queens is such that if a queen is laying eggs in a mating nuc, she is deemed saleable. I'm buying a queen whose mother is known, whose sperm donors might have been any Tom, Dick or Harry, Larry, Moe or Curly AND I expect that queen to be every bit as good as her expensive breeder mother!? I think that's asking a lot. I can buy queens advertised to be descendants of SMR breeders for $8.50 a pop in quantity. At that price I don't know how much expectation I can have of that open mated queen to have retained all or enough of the SMR trait that I can sit back and be confident that suppressive mite reproduction is happening in her hive. I can buy an II SMR queen for $50. At that price I think it's very reasonable of me to expect suppressive mite reproduction in her hive. Hmmm. That's a $41.50 difference. Nice chunk of change. That easily covers any sort of strips I might use (back when strips worked) and leaves money to pay for an independent source that could be evaluating those open mated $8.50 queens (as Allen has proposed). I'm not sure what to make of that figure. $50 a hive is took much for me, guess I'll have to get more hives, which means more queens at $50, so more hives, more queens, more, more, more.... OK, that's not working. > Super beekeepers will learn to be real beekeepers and rear and mate > their own queens. Yes, I even wrote this conclusion down in my notebook at Niagara Falls. The rub there is it takes time and raising queens definitely puts the beekeeper on the bees' schedule and good queens don't just happen! Growing queens is easy. Breeding and mating superior queens is at least an art, arguable a science! But yes, breeding your own queens is a better solution. However you still have the open mating issue and the possibility of bad wine. Raising your own and practicing II, the ultimate solution! Guess THIS beekeeper is going to need longer days and longer weeks to run all those extra hives and raise all those queens. Good night, Aaron