Tom, you said that you did some research on the Carniolan breed. I did the same thing in-depth, because our bee course instructor always orders this breed from Australia in the spring. He runs about 1,200 hives. I wondered why he chose this breed and wanted to find out why. I am sure that all breeds of bees are wonderful, bees are simply wonderful. Period. I know that we can't take everything that we read on the net as absolutely the full truth, it may be biased, but I really did read some interesting stuff about this breed and it all makes qutie a bit of sense. Probably this breed shares many of the great attributes of other breeds, but I will recap what I read. Overwintering population is smaller than that of other bee races, but during spring and summer, the population increases substantially to a comparable size to the other races. They build up very rapidly in spring (reason why they are referred to as ‘spring honey flow beesâ€). This characteristic allows the colonies to take full advantage of the EARLY honey flows, but they require careful handling, due to the propensity for swarming because of the fast spring build-up. Their tongue is longer (6.5 to 6.7 mm) which is well adapted for clover, a very high elbow joint and very short hair. Carniolan are gentle and non-aggressive, possess excellent sense of orientation, taking advantage of mountainous ranges (that is good for us here) and do not rob honey from other beehives (not so sure if that is really true though). Evidently the Carniolan forager bee lives 4 to 9 days longer than other races. Strongly resistant to nosema and dystentery, and can spend up to 150 days inside the hive in winter. This breed is a good wax producer and naturally clean (hence their advantage in comb honey production) and low tendency to propolise. Interesting information. I don’t know how true it all is, but my Carniolans are definitely sweet tempered. I can tell this immediately when I worked with new packages that I got last spring, compared to my other colonies that were overwintered, (which may have had a new mix in the breed due to queen supercedure or nuc/split activities). I think that I heard someone saying in the bee club that I attend though, that Australian packages have a tendency for supercedure of their queen, maybe they had an experience with this, I never really asked very much of it. I did have a swarm that I caught during my first summer of beekeeping. This was a horribly protective hive and man were they cranky, so I know about cranky and sweet bees for sure. I have a good comparison. Great day. Cindi