Sure Dee - here’s what I have running right now going into the winter :
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‘Home’ local bred queen/colonies ( I am in a woods setting on the North shore of Long Island with a lot of ‘wild’ bees & pollinators and temps get down to 0-20 over winter w/ snow). These were raised by California nurse bees & brood from #3 - the queen the made was from #3 eggs.
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California ‘mystery meat’ package. This is my baseline of a typical package of Italians likely from California. They are by far the meanest so I suspect some Africanized behavior in there. Note: They were also the colony that tried to rob the others. I have heard others running Italians have noted their ‘greediness’. When I use packages (emergency & experiments) I typically replace the queens with North Eastern VSH ones and use the population to rear the brood & forage.
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An overwintered queen set from Connecticut. This breeder defines this heritage as “VP Queen’s Spartan line(VSH) and Sue Cobey’s New World Carniolan line”.
I had a few other VSH queens from more Southern sources but the colonies they were introduced to superseded them. I’m looking forward to getting @Michael_Bush 's line in there along with a source in Maine & Canada. I have read there is a danger of over-optimizing the trait and creating OCD bees - we’ll see. Another trait I am looking for is successful defense of Yellow Jackets as that is a big problem where I am.
Note that all frames are natural comb at roughly 4.7-5 cm cell size with no drone comb removed. Will keep all posted on this.
Here’s a related study on re-queening packages with local queens: https://youtu.be/UTW4ykwm_m8