Not to rest at all! Dr. Steve Sheppard and others continues to follow this. Out of the entire US bee population of perhaps 4 million hives, the vast majority of queens are produced each season from a relative handful of breeder queens, by only a few producers. I think these numbers are closer to the actual: > In studies conducted in 1993-1994 and in 2004-2005, U.S. commercial queen producers self-reported the production of close to 1 million queens for sale from around 600 and 500 queen "mothers," respectively (Schiff and Sheppard, 1995, 1996; Delaney et al., 2009). Sammataro, Diana, and Jay A. Yoder, eds. Honey bee colony health: challenges and sustainable solutions. CRC Press, 2011. *********************************************** The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html