In Quebec at present a lot of research is being done about queen bees. The projects focus specifically on two techniques.
First, some research projects focus on creating a reserve of queens. In other words, instead of putting a single queen in the hive to spend the winter, you put 40 there. The quality has been shown to stay about the same. In fact, this was the subject of my master's project at Université Laval and we are just about to present the results.
The other project we have done a huge amount of work on in Quebec, in order to achieve self-sufficiency in Canada, is queen bee selection. When it comes to research, we are easily ten years ahead of the rest of Canada and even North America, given all the data we have. Quebec is actually very specialized in Holstein dairy cow and swine selection, for example.
We are currently gathering all our knowledge about bees using statistics software like animal BLUP: the best linear unbiased prediction method for animals.
As well, we are currently conducting a new project, which will be presented to Genome Canada, for which we are requesting $1.8 million to get even further in the study of the bee genome.