> Queen "quality" significantly varied among commercial sources for physical characters but not for mating characters. These findings suggest that it may be more effective to improve overall queen reproductive potential by culling lower-quality queens rather than systematically altering current queen production practices. 

Tarpy, D. R., Keller, J. J., Caren, J. R., & Delaney, D. A. (2012). Assessing the mating 'health' of commercial honey bee queens. Journal of economic entomology, 105(1), 20-25.


I have a big problem with this statement,  "Suggest",  and "culling lower quality"  for research,  these are nonsensical.  No meaning or information.  A lot of the stuff from Tarpy is along these lines right now.   Hopefully it will improve.  Gradeing queens by appearance (for a fee) is just crazy IMO....

And yet there is where we are,  at this point in beekeeping  we still cannot judge a queen until shes either dead,  or been laying in a hive for 6 months....  I complete understand the difficulty,  what I don’t understand is the experts who know a good queen from bad before they have been "tested"

Even here,  many say a queen lays best her second year...  and different lines lay differently based on outside influences.   Carnis for example in my experience will not respond until natural pollen and nectar is avalible....  Russians even more so...

But "experts" are driving the system from the outside....???   I will take the experience of any of the breeders who are picking the best of the best,  year in year out,  long before researchers tell us which ones are good.



Charles

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