The discussion about the relative importance of good rearing technique versus good breeding (so to speak) is a *nature versus nurture* issue. If you think about it some, you can see that some conclusions seem reasonable, even without documented research. (Although I'd like to see the research, too.) Lamarck and Lysenko aside, rearing queens by excellent or poor methods will have no effect on the genetic background of the queen or on the genetic makeup of her offspring (assuming adequate mating with unrelated drones). If queens of a particular line tend to produce large honey crops (through tremendous fecundity, or worker longevity, or hoarding behavior, or early build up, or whatever), then rearing methods will have no effect on the *potential* for that line to produce excellent queens whenever rearing conditions are also excellent. The individual worker bees produced from a bad queen with good genes should show the same longevity, hoarding behavior, etc. as they would if the queen had been excellent. Where poor queen rearing methods *can* diminish the honey production of a colony headed by a queen from a highly productive line seems to me to be limited to the effects on her ability to lay lots of worker eggs at the right time, that hatch into larvae that nurse bees like to care for. To the extent that queen rearing methods affect those characters, then they also should affect the honey production of her colony. Her offspring would be the same, but there wouldn't be as many of them. There seem to me to be lots of possible ways that poor rearing might result in poor fecundity or low brood viability. If I starve a queen cell or a newly-mated queen, will her mature ovaries produce fewer eggs, or eggs with lower inherent survivorship? Does a queen that emerges from a poorly-tended cell become unattractive to worker bees? Maybe big queens smell nicer than little queens, and get fed more often. A few weeks ago, I read here about a brood disease that resembled EFB, but was apparently caused by rejected larvae coming from a queen that was poorly fed during ovarian development. This would certainly affect honey production of her colony. Maybe a poorly-reared queen has some glandular imbalance that causes workers to ignore her eggs and larvae. I'm speculating on most all of this, but who knows? The general question of whether genetic background is more important than rearing methods seems to me to be so broad as to be unanswerable. If it is reasonable to say that rearing methods have a real effect on a queen's rate of reproduction (measured by emerging, healthy worker bees at the right time of year), then rearing methods should have a real effect on honey production, given queens of similar genetic backgrounds. Likewise, the queen's genetic background should also have a real effect on honey production, given queens raised under similar (and adequate) methods. Which one is more important than the other depends on which one happens to be the limiting factor in a given situation. Kevin