a mike thurlow snip... 
Am surprised there have been no comments regarding this paper.

In some parts of the UK we are seeing very high virgin queen failure and premature queen failure,  after a couple of weeks laying.

Anyone done any drone viability testing, what's within the scope of  a home laboratory ?

my comment...
As a side remark I have now been pulled out of retirement to once again take the position at the Texas A&M Bee Lab to take the position of chief apiarist.  An old man can't get no rest and some of just don't know how to say no!

As to Mike's remarks no I have not done this in the home laboratory but we have had an ongoing project at the TAMU bee lab concerning drone fertility.  I can speak only casually of this since this study had not been published.  In some way it is significantly different from the UK experiment and may lead to alternative hypothesis and conclusions.  In several way this unpublished study is quite a bit more technically sophisticated in terms of looking at basic drone fertility.  A good bit of the initial data was collected from my own bee yards and several other which were all untreated bee stock here in Central Texas.

I wish I could provide more detail but that will simply have to wait. 

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