I'm totally in favour of that option of being self-sustainable. I'm totally in favour of promoting the strengthening of our bee breeding industry.
There are obstacles, of course, that we must consider. We have a short season for queen breeding here in Canada compared to the U.S. or other countries. We can produce fewer queens here than beekeepers in more temperate climate regions can produce, because we cannot work all year long, so that limits the number of queens that we can produce.
Also, when we produce queens here, it happens to be late in the season and then many beekeepers don't want those queens, so what we need to develop is new technology to overwinter those queens that were produced in one particular year to be used the following year. However, we don't have that technology in place and it has to be developed.
We also need to develop more efficient methods of nucleus colony production to be self-sufficient.