Why local Northern queens?

Why would we want local northern raised queens and genetics in our apiaries? Those southern queens we are getting are available early in the season when we want them so what’s wrong with them? I did some searching on the internet and I did not have much luck finding studies comparing the performance of any local bees to southern raised bees. Common sense tells us that bees bred in California probably don’t have the ability to time the nectar flow in every part of the country that they are shipped to. And they don’t have as good a chance of surviving a real winter as northern bred bees do. But we all know common sense isn’t always correct. I did find research carried out by members of the international honey bee research association COLOSS, which has members in 63 countries. The research was published in a special issue of the Journal of Apicultural Research in 2014. It concluded that “bees that are adapted to the local environment fare much better than bees that have been purchased and imported from a completely different home area.” “It is very clear that the local bees fare better than imported ones, and that they live longer,” said Dr. Kryger.

So I did not find much research, but what about the personal experience and opinion of beekeepers we trust?

Randy Oliver Queens For Pennies First published in: American Bee Journal, March 2014 “I’ve been encouraged in recent years by the number of beekeepers who appear to be successfully keeping locally-adapted stocks of bees without treatment for varroa. I am a strong supporter of their efforts, and see them as the wave of the future.”

Michael Bush, www.bushfarms.com Michael says of feral (local) bees: “From my experience they are often more productive because they are more attuned to your climate and build up at the appropriate time to make a good crop.”

http://kirkwebster.com/index.php/feral-bees Kirk Webster says “in order to move a productive apiary back toward health and balance, and away from miticides, adaptations must be made in both genetics (breeding) and methods (management). There are no bees you can introduce into your colonies that will solve all their problems and allow you to return to the beekeeping of the 1970’s and early ’80’s; and there are no management schemes that will maintain productivity in an untreated apiary without stock that already has some ability to co-exist with varroa and other pests, and which is capable of further improvement.” Kirk is talking about local, feral bees here.

Michael Palmer’s YouTube video “Queen Rearing in the Sustainable Apiary” Michael asks “Why are you buying queen bees from far away places when you can raise queens that are better than anything you can buy?” He then goes on to say “Queen bees are not difficult to raise. We can raise better queens than we can buy from far away places.” “The best queens are going to come from your own area. Grown under the same conditions that you are keeping your bees”