Cliff van Eaton wrote: << According to Steve, Farrar came to the conclusion that the stock from this particular queen rearer was not any better genetically than that available anywhere else. Farrar found that when they reared queens from the queen rearer's stock and stock obtained from the poorer performing stock, all resulting stocks performed similarly. Steve says in the article that "it wasn't the stock that so so good, it was the queen breeder himself" (ie, the way he reared his queens). The thing that stood out in his queen rearing was his care and selection of each queen and queen cell at every step of the production cycle. >> I can send any of you very good producing stock but there is little chance that you can rear from these queens daughters that would be as good as their mothers. You would have to work as hard as I do as a minimum. Anybody can graft from a good queen. Most of the time the daughters will have great variations in their performance. What you will have to do is graft from several good queens from the selected stock, evaluate the daughters from each breeder queen and pick the one that has the best and more stable offspring. You may loose also some quality because you do not have mating areas stuffed with drones from a good compatible stock. To be a good breeder you have to have some good genetics but you also have to know how to use it. Jean-Pierre Chapleau eleveur de reines / queen breeder 1282 rang, 8 St-Adrien-de-Ham, Quebec, Canada [log in to unmask]