I got an email today, asking about US sources of Russian queens and packages
for this coming season.  The writer is in the USA, getting back into bees,
and has not seen advertising for Russians in the short time he has been
looking.

Has anyone in the US found a supplier of either Russian queens and/or
Russian packages that (s)he would care to recommend?  Or -- without running
down any suppliers by name -- any practices to watch out for?

With most strains of queens, a purebred queen can often simply shipped with
a package of non-purebred bees, since, usually the new queen is well
accepted after riding with the bees, and within a few weeks, the newly
installed hive will assume the characteristics of the queen.

However it occurs to me that, perhaps, this practice might not work well
with Russians, since I've heard reports about Russian queens being harder to
introduce into non-Russian stock.

Has anyone direct experience in these matters, and care to comment?

Mentioning the above practice of shipping a queen with non-related bees,
makes me think.  Does anyone on the list specify, when ordering, for
example, a carniolan queen, that the bees in the package must also be
carniolan?   Does it matter?  How much?

(In Canada these days, due to the difficulty and uncertainty of getting
packages (or even queens) because of restrictions on bee imports, we don't
get to specify anything.  We just order what we can, from limited genetics,
pray that the packages we order will actually arrive, (and arrive alive),
and then accept anything we get.  Hopefully that will change soon).

allen
http://www.honeybeeworld.com/diary/

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