How do you manage to avoid buying queens?

[Acebird]

I think we need to get Mike Palmer and Michael Bush up here to visit our associations.

Someone in our club meeting last night said Mike Palmer operates out of Vermont and is a queen rearing guru. Is this the same Mike Palmer?

[Adam Foster Collins]

That's the one...

[delber]

They aren't listening. You don't need to split your hives in the spring and you don't need to buy queens from who knows where. You raise the queens in the summer on the main flow, and winter them over in nucleus colonies.

This is exactly my plan. I hope to raise queens this summer and do exactly this. If I'm able to get in a couple years about 20 nucs I figure that is at least 15 less packages coming to my area. Last year I think the numbers of packages that came into my association was somewhere in the 60-80 range. I hope to help to reduce that number. (Hey you never know I may be able to reduce it all together. That's my hope anyway)

[Adam Foster Collins]

So I guess it comes down to individual beeks raising and wintering their own queens in order to be ready for spring expansion (if their climate allows for that, as Allen points out). I guess the continued problem with that, is that if your neighbor is importing, then any bugs or diseases coming with them are likely going to end up with you anyway.

I wonder if we might actually do better at beating the pests with a more open policy toward importation.

If we could order bees from more sources, perhaps we'd create better genetic diversity and bees and more resistant stock. Right now, we can only get them from Australia, New Zealand and Hawaii.

Adam