Great discussion everyone!  Having tried most every type of mating nuc
myself, I'm in agreement with the pros and cons of each.

And I was waiting for Trevor to bring up the Rhodes ref that Seth was
referring to : )
There may be a simple explanation.  In my experience, a percentage of
queens fail shortly after initiating egg laying.  Thus, by allowing them to
lay for a few weeks before pulling them for shipment (and evaluating for
brood and queen quality), the producer takes the loss, rather than the
eager buyer.

I also agree with Trevor's comparison to race horses.  Queen bees are not
like breeding clonal individuals of plants -- each of which can be expected
to perform identically.  Despite having a common mother, each of that
mother's daughters (those sold to the buyer) likely have a different
father.  And then the patritlines of workers produced by the sold queens
(the granddaughters of the original breeder queen) will also differ
greatly.  So you can't really expect *a colony* resulting from a sold queen
from a breeder whose *colony *performed spectacularly to mimic the
performance of their grandmother's *colony.*

In Nature, at least half of all colonies, on average, would be expected to
die (since on average, every colony divides by swarming at least once).
Thus, natural selection can continually weed out the poor performers.
There is no reason for a beekeeper to expect every queen's colony to be a
good performer.  If you're not weeding out the poor performers, you're
working against natural selection.

In our own operation, we start each season with at least double the number
of nucs that we expect to take to almonds 11 months later as strong
colonies.  Yes, a 50% "colony loss" rate, but by design and culling, rather
than mortality.  And then by the next spring, we've selected only ~1% of
our starting number of queens as breeders for the next season (I always use
at least 25 as breeders, in order to maintain genetic diversity and sex
alleles).  That's strong selective pressure!  But the result is the bee
that performs best in our environment and management.


> --
>
Randy Oliver
Grass Valley, CA
www.ScientificBeekeeping.com

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