T & M Weatherhead wrote:
>> And the deterioration and mis-matching that comes from caging,
>> shipping, banking, & introducing to distant colonies...
>
> Can you give us references for these points.

Not sure what you are asking for, since these effects are constantly
discussed by beekeepers throughout North America, and I assumed, elsewhere
in the world, and I know you to be -- or have been -- a producer and shipper
of high quality queens for many years, but I'll expand a bit.

In the past decade alone, numerous magazine articles and Internet
discussions have discussed the problems that can arise from holding queens
in cages for periods of time; the effects of queen age at introduction and
timing of queen introduction (an Australian study, I believe); the
documented extremes of temperature and handling that queens experience while
travelling via mail or courier; the problems of banking in regard to
potential damage to queens' feet when held in banks; and the difficulties
people experience in getting Russian queens accepted by non-Russsian
colonies (to discuss only very obvious example).

Of course these effects are not always present, or even very significant
when they are, and even when they occur, it is hard for a buyer to know what
went wrong.  These problems do not necessarily occur in every case, but for
many -- particularly those ordering small numbers in remote areas -- one or
more of these factors can come up and combine to reduce requeening success
and queen performance very significantly, on enough occasions to be very
discouraging.  Moreover, every commercial beekeeper I know can trot out
numerous stories about batches of purchased queens that just were no good,
or which were all superceded in short order.

Producing, holding, shipping, and introducing commercial mated queens is
fraught with peril for the buyer.  Most of the time it works out okay, and
often very well, but things go wrong often enough that few will dispute that
raising your own queens under conditions that you control yourself, and
where these effects can be avoided or at least controlled, is superior to
relying on mass-produced queens reared at a distant point, banked, and
shipped.

Hope I have helped.

allen
http://www.honeybeeworld.com/diary/

As I write this, and for the past three hours, we have been experiencing a
heavy downpour.  This should break our drought, and also ensure that the
grasshoppers which were predicted to eat everything except the telephone
poles, go to grasshopper heaven sooner than they had planned.

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