"? The only way would be to mark all the old queens and if you actually went to the trouble to hunt down all 350 queens, you would have killed them and put the cells in the next day. So I assume you didn't do that. Just finding a young queen in most of the hives, proves nothing since bees are raising a lot of new queens this time of year. 





Old data Peter,  lots of newer reality out there.  Technique learned from Andy Card,  done also by MANY others. At a level  that science and "experiments" cannot follow. Every year literally 400k cells are sold for that purpose.  From Miksa's to Kohnens.   There are tricks to it.  

As for how we know,  real easy in this case,  we had Dark Carniola queens from last year,  this trade out was for very light colored Italian from Andy Miksa.  The difference was/is striking.   We did not plan that.  We had hoped for a 50% rate.

As mentioned the downside was 3-4 weeks broodless.  That time is greatly reduced if the weather cooperates.  This year it did not.  In good weather the new queen is laying in 10-14 days.  This year it was 21-30.
Therein lies the other big clue,  had the "old Queen" survived  there would not have been a broodless period.


Its fine to look at old data and research,  its not fine to discount new things or results that don’t agree with your paradigm.  If I accepted the old paradigms constantly,  I would be stuck in the past.   I am trying to move to the future.   In this case Andy Card mentioned this method a while back.  I was hesitant, read some of the stuff you cited.  Fortunately I was willing to listen to someone with a bit more experience in the area, And started asking other large producers.  Guess what?  Its done a lot more than you think.

One guy who runs 3500 hives even had a trick of moving the hives off the pallets and putting them 4-5 feet apart.  He advised they get about 10% more successfully mated and returned to the right box.  Now a guy who does that 3500 times a year I suspect knows what hes talking about.

There are huge variables,  timing and weather are a portion.  Instead of discounting,  I find asking the right questions to be more valuable.


Charles

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