Randy: "And I wouldn't necessarily select for hygienic behavior"

Gene: "> Since this trait is quantifiable I would certainly place this first on my list.."

I personally would not select at all for hygienic behavior.  Hygienic behavior as measured by either the cell prick or nitrogen freeze methods does tell you how good that queen is at fighting AFB.  And back when the world was loaded with ferals which helped keep AFB epidemics going strong this was important.  Althou apparently not real important as AFB resistant bees have been developed several times over the last 100 years but no one seemed to see enough benefit to continue those lines.  But, these days AFB is seldom a problem.  A far bigger problem is EFB.  Hygienic behavior does absolutely nothing to stop an EFB infection.  In controlled tests hives infected with EFB were requeened with Minnesota Hygienic queens and the results were the EFB infection continued unchecked.  For a number of years I ran nothing but MH stock and found a lot of EFB problems with that stock.  I saw no benefit at all to MH queens versus other kinds of queens.  Hygienic behavior bought you nothing at all in terms of mite resistance.  In my climate MH queens are dead hives the first or second  winter unless you have an aggressive mite control program.  In fact the non MH queens from California I have right now have not had a single case of EFB to date and if anything winter better than MH queens.  At least in my hands MH were only modest honey producers..  Nearly all of mine were fine to work with bare arms and hands.  But I can say that about lots and lots of bees.  My conclusion is unless you really want AFB resistance hygienic behavior buys you nothing. Why select for something that buys you nothing?  You might as well breed for color which at least is pretty.  One positive of MH queens was I found them very easy to select for lack of swarming.  It only took a few years of aggressive selection against swarming before I had bees that very seldom swarmed.  But, I am sure that had nothing to do with them being hygienic.  Lack of swarming is well known to be easy to select for.  Or equally easy to select for more swarming if that is your desire.  In fact if you want to select against swarming all you need to do is do nothing to prevent swarming other than provide needed space in all hives, breed from your very best honey producers, never propagate from a swarm cell or hive that swarmed, and replace the queen raised in a hive that swarms with one from a good honey producer that did not swarm.

Dick

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