I'll take a quick stab at that.
We are reliant on importing stock because we need queens so early. We need maximum population by July 1 to make a honey crop, so with 21-day intervals, we need that queen as early as possible. We cannot breed them early enough ourselves here, so we are purchasing queens.
Australia and New Zealand are a couple of options with packaged bees, and we also purchase queens from Hawaii. There is a handful of producers from California that are able to meet the protocol to export to us, and some come from Chile.
Stocks can vary and the quality of queens can vary because of weather conditions where they come from as well. A lot of the queen production is a result of the quality of mating, and there is a lot of variance in that as well.
Would you like to comment?