>... is a bit problematic. 🤣 How am I supposed to stay away from those if I raise my own queens!!
Start with local bees and let them mate with local bees. If you want more control over the genetics see if you can get your neighboring beekeepers to use your queens. (give them away if you need to). You're assuming that all the AHB are unworkable. They aren't. Once you are raising your own queens, if you get a hot one, just put a couple of queens cells in and let it go off as a supersedure. Then you won't have to find the queen.
>Have the AHB actually reached your part of Nebraska?
No, we don't have AHB. The time I had unworkable bees they were from Texas and they swarmed. The next queens emerged and I had vicious bees. I requeened. I have worked with AHB in New Mexico, Arizona, Florida, the Virgin Islands and Texas.
>Yes, I think you're right about Dee Lusby.
Dee seems to like to test people by throwing boxes around. If you treat her bees normally they act pretty normally though some of them are a bit hot.
> Of course, she attributed her success re varroa to her small-cell foundation, but people who visited her apiary remarked that her bees were pretty aggressive. So I'm guessing that her bees likely had some AHB genetics.
Likely they do at this point, but she was handling Varroa before anyone thought there were AHB in Arizona.