Pet peeve triggered. This is little to do with the honey bee "collapse", and the linking to warmer fall seasons is not the right causation in my opinion. A no

Pet peeve triggered. This is little to do with the honey bee "collapse", and the linking to warmer fall seasons is not the right causation in my opinion. A not-so-secret secret for beekeepers is to get your queens locally. Why? Because your queens adjust and even genetically select to the local weather and environment over generations. It is much better to capture a swarm locally than to buy a queen from some fancy dealer several states over. There are very happy queens on the equator, going around 12 months without "winter clustering". If you take a queen from Nebraska, ship it to the Pacific Northwest, what do you think the queen will do? "Collapse". Take a Florida "native" queen and take it to Nebraska, her entire colony will "collapse" because the girls have no idea how to survive in Nebraska winter. What is this "shipping" about you ask? I would be remiss if I did not mention big agg [0]. that fine almonds, grapes, and avocados. the Pacific northwest hives do not pollinate all those plants. Transplanted colonies in thousands from all over the US are pollinating so you get your almond milk. A lot of those colonies cannot survive the weather change. They pollinate then die. Many unscrupulous beekeepers will just destroy all their colonies. There is no financial incentive to ship them back and forth. they can start a new colony for way less. [0]: https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/outlooks/37059/49131_special-article-september_-pollinator-service-market-4-.pdf?v=595 https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/outlooks/37059/49131_specia... Old article but should give a bit more weight to grasping the commercial bee business. (Yes, I have hives in a subtropical region.)