Your right, it usually is more trouble than it seems to be worth... of course its location dependant as well... in our southern-most locations they never stop raising drones, but travel a few hours north or to a higher altitude and they don't start rearing drones until mid Feb... by mid May we are shifting focus to different regions as those deep south locations are finishing up the main flow and preparing for the dearth as the temps start hitting 100+...
Whether its really worth the effort or not depends on your customers and just how many of them are really demanding about getting mated queens for Feb and March... in most cases this group can make up 25% of your annual sales, so for an operation producing 1,000 queens per season, they can probably do without all of the extra trouble and just focus on producing more at a time when the season is in full swing... but for an operation that is producing 85,000 queens per season, that 25% can cover the expenses of the heavy manipulations and travel involved in making it work... its not easy, and it requires some serious investment on the part of the producer just to be able to pull it off and not have poorly mated queens... sometimes this means culling thousands of queens at once and having to restock thousands of mating nucs and start all over again... this is when you see an operations true colors... some simply cage the poor quality queens and pass them on to the customers in packages or as queens... others will deal with the fussing in order to protect the operations of their customers from losses due to junk queens... its a nightmare some years and a daymare others...