NEEDED: MORE BEE BREEDERS
“What we really need,” stated Krispn, “are more bee breeders who are seriously selecting for heritable traits. We have plenty of queen rearers. Sometimes the best bees are in our backyards — locally adapted bees we can use to select for high levels of certain desirable traits.”
One of the great challenges for breeders is controlled mating. Unless you have an isolated island of your own or are in an extremely isolated area, you will need to do instrumental insemination if you are going to control the drone side of genetics. Otherwise, you may have a great queen, but if she goes out and mates with drones carrying unknown genetics or alleles, any good traits she may have had to pass on to her progeny will be seriously diluted.
