>>...maybe your efforts to saturate the local area with "good" drones will be of no real use after all.

Your good drones will be of use to virgins from hives a few miles away. :)

I read that it's good to surround one's mating yard with unrelated drone colonies located a few miles away in different directions.  This is supposed result in congregations of drones not related to one's own.  Ideally, the virgins and the drones should be of different lineages.  This is not very practical in suburbia and the gain may be marginal.

I think if you are raising only a dozen queens they will find ample unrelated drones in most of the US.  [Naturally, this is undesirable in the Africanized areas...]  However, it will serve well any large queen producer to engage in unrelated drone rearing.

3 years ago all my hives had fairly dark NWC queens and bees.  With each supercedure and my raising queens, the resulting bees would get more Italian looking.  I concluded that my virgins mated, or preferred to mate, with males from surrounding apiaries or feral colonies which were probably of lighter color.

Waldemar  

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