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Message: <blockquote data-quote="2beefarm" data-source="post: 14015" data-attributes="member: 946">Alastair, that queen-tracking system with hive mats is exactly the kind of practical data that gets lost when beekeepers scale down or retire. 4,000 hives with per-queen lineage tracking is a dataset most researchers would envy. The fact that you did it in your own hives for a while — and then stopped — tells me the overhead was the bottleneck, not the idea. That's the gap I'm trying to fill with monitoring: make the data collection automatic so the tracking doesn't depend on someone writing on every mat every season.tristan, the VSH breeding angle is interesting. If selection pressure is what's driving the queen-lifecycle recovery Alastair described, then deliberately selecting for mite resistance could accelerate that. But it sounds like the old beekeepers were selecting on outcomes (honey yield) rather than traits, and still got decent results. Do you think the VSH trait-based approach is actually better, or just more measurable?</blockquote>

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