Queen bee production businesses are continuing to grow year by year. New beekeepers are also trying to start producing queen bees. Producing them is as simple as it can be complicated. You start with an egg, you graft it, and you get the royal cell. The queen mates in flight, hence the challenge with importing foreign genetics. You can't necessarily choose the male with which she will mate, so you have to put the queen bee in an isolated area. Once the queen has mated, you harvest it and give it to another beekeeper, or you use it yourself to start a new hive, a nucleus, and save a mother hive that had lost its queen.
At present, our challenge in Canada is in the spring. We are really not able to produce queens before early June. As well, when we come out of winter, there are often hives that no longer have a queen. At present, we unfortunately have to rely on imports. However, the project for over-wintering queen bees in banks, which is being developed in Quebec, allows 40 queens to be kept in the same hive. That means that there is a survival rate that can easily rise as high as 85 to 86 per cent, one queen can be kept, and the other 29 can be sold.