Hi Dick, Bob, Joe & All,

Thanks Bob & Dick for driving my point home about Better Queens. Those
queens developed from the get go from an egg are better than those developed
from a larva even apparently only a few hours old. So again I say that
production queens reared by means of grafting are in affect only emergency
queens. Some will be far better than others reared by the grafting method
and some not so good soon to be superseded by the workers. The supersedure
queen will be a Better Queen, contingent that there be enough drones to mate
her, developed from an egg from the get go.

Henry Alley and Jay Smith both developed methods of Queen rearing that
either used eggs or very very young larvae younger than a day old. According
to references provided by both Bob and Dick the best queens develop when fed
properly from hatching from the egg. Alley's and Smith's methods may be
crude and grafting is a way to push out hundreds of queens quickly but
perhaps newer methods need developed to produce queens from eggs instead of
from larvae.

The fact that most beekeepers are small enough they can produce queens using
Alley's or Smith's methods and achieve Better Queens than can be produced by
production queen breeders. This is only one reason I am promoting that
beekeepers rear and mate their own queens and learn to do it as close to the
egg as possible.

For the smaller beekeeper Swarming can be induced from selected breeder
queens and queen cells used either in splits or mating nucs. These queens
will be queens developed from eggs. As soon as the Swarm cells are started
the breeder queen can be taken off by a small split of two frames for a
short period to keep her at home and not flying off.

We as beekeepers really should be doing our part in keeping bees, rearing
queens is part of beekeeping and not as difficult to do as some think it is
or some would like you to think it is.

 . ..   Keith Malone, Chugiak, Alaska USA, http://www.cer.org/,
c(((([ , Apiarian, http://takeoff.to/alaskahoney/,
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/akbeekeepers/ ,
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Norlandbeekeepers/ ,
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ApiarianBreedersGuild/

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
-- Visit www.honeybeeworld.com/BEE-L for rules, FAQ and  other info ---
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::