>[log in to unmask] writes:
Back in the day, you could by a tested queen, in fact, some suppliers offered four categories<Back in the day, our best MT beekeepers and Canadian beekeepers would go out in the fall and gather in the colonies that displayed the highest productivity, put them in a safe place - often on the south side of a barn, and wrap them for over-wintering. In early spring, they'd check the hives for those with a good-sized remaining cluster and a laying queen. Those queens were then shipped to breeder on the west coast, and the beekeepers would insist on getting back the queen daughters of their 'own' queens.After the border to Canada was closed and with the advent of migratory bees going to CA for almond pollination, virtually all queen selection was and still is made in CA where there's no harsh winter.Jim Bach, who passed in 2014, was the WA State Apiarist. He started seeing colonies with poor clustering behavior. A cotton ball with queen pheromone would induce clustering, the queens didn't.I've seen the same in MT. Several years of shaking bees into nucs in Plains, MT. The box of queens shipped in the day before from CA could sit on the bed of the truck, in a yard with over 1000 colonies, and shaking in progress, and even the free-range workers shipped with the queens would abandon the queens that they were shipped with, and hardly any of the bees from all of the 1000+ colonies paid any attention to the queens in an open box. A few of the queens, as received, drew in workers to their cages, but whole rows of boxes with over 100 queens went bare.Now, in my own apiaries, if I receive good queens, I have to keep the queen box in the cab to avoid mobbing.Jim's hypothesis, and I tend to agree, selecting breeder queens from colonies in CA lacks any selection for good clustering and over-wintering success.We've lost something that I think is important to selecting queens that can sustain colonies over the winter.
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