Hi Folks, I want to start off by apologizing. Last Saturday, a seminar was hosted by the Lehigh Valley and Bucks County Beekeeping Associations. It was held in Southeastern PA , 35 mi north of Philadelphia. I am apologizing because I forgot to post it to the list. I realize that the majority of the members would not be able to attend, but you should have at least known about the opportunity. I am truly sorry because it was a very good seminar. Guest speakers included Bob Smith (National Honey Board), Larry Connor, Ph.D. (Wicwas Press), Robert Roeshman, MD. (practicing apitherapist), and Ibrahim Cakmak, Ph.D. (Penn State University). I have no excuse except I forgot. With that said, I would like to touch on one of the topics discussed. It was Dr. Cakmak's talk on the queen viability research being done at Penn State. I will not go into the details but there are few points I would like to mention. In recent years there have been problems creeping up with queens. This includes poor performance, early supersedure, small size, just to name a few. The researchers selected queens from a number of queen breeders and tested them for overall weight, amount of sperm, weight of ovaries, presence of tracheal mites, and a few other items. The results were disturbing. It seemed that most queens tested were infected with mites, slightly underweight (<210 mg), had smaller ovaries and a lower than desirable sperm count. I don't have actual numbers, and results could change from sampling to sampling, but the overall quality of the queens was somewhat down. The numbers were not terrible, just less than one would expect. NO BREEDERS NAMES WERE MENTIONED, so please don't ask me or Penn State. There was one breeder who consistently had the best overall performance, but again, we don't know who it was. (With the price of quality queens, I wish I did.) Dr. Cakmak did state that the information would be shared with the breeders. He offered a number of suggestions as to the causes of the problem, but this will have to wait for additional research. I think they are on the right track, and Penn State should be commended for their effort. Please don't take this information as my saying that commercial queens should not be purchased. In fact I think the breeders should also be commended for their participation. This is the only way we can learn and improve. Sorry my forgetfulness may have prevented someone from attending. You know what they say about the memory being the second thing to go. We will be having additional seminars in the future and plan on doing a better job of publicizing them. Ron Bogansky Kutztown, PA