Concerning Mark's queen question,

If you need many queens the equipment and hoopla in the literature is
great.   I've read a lot about it and tried some techniques.  However,
if you need one or two new queens, the job is simple.

Get a frame with really young brood from your best colony, lightly brush
the bees from
it, mark it, and put it in the brood area of the target colony.  Then
kill the undesired queen.  Check every couple days for ten days for
supersedure cells by shaking the bees off the unmarked frames and
removing cells, but treat the chosen brood most gently and leave
supercedure cells on it.  In a couple weeks a virgin queen will leave a
smooth hole in her cell and tear a hole in the side of other cells.  If
you question whether a queen is present, insert some more young good
brood.  If the bees make supersedure cells there is no queen, leave the
cells and treat them gently.  When the bees don't make supersedure
cells, they have a queen; you should find eggs in a week or two more.

Be merciless in culling your stock so you have only drones you would
want used.  Put a frame of drone foundation in each of your favorite
hives not related to those from which you are taking young brood for
queens.  It seems to take lots of drones to make queens who have long
laying lives.

I'm thankful to good queen breeders for some really fine stock, and some
of their good queens deserve to have their bloodlines preserved by
breeding some great home-grown queens.  Some of the commercially
available queens are exquisite, but others in the same batch can be
duds.  Use your good queens to requeen the colonies with duds.   Be sure
to buy some good stock every year to test, and perhaps use to diversify
your gene pool.  There seems to be little truth in rumors of nasty
hybrids, good bees seem to beget good bees, and probably the converse is
also true.  After several generations of hybrids, I'm still waiting for
those nasty bees, and have a very nice bunch of mongrels.

It's fun to do this, and the good daughters and granddaughters of good
old queens bring back fond memories.  Some bee families are just
lovable.

Bill Morong