>I have come to the conclusion that emergency queens are inferior
>if raised at any time other than a major honey flow. Nothing new
>here. But I have arrived at another conclusion. Emergency queens
>are inferior if there are large numbers of feral colonies or
>lousy beekeepers in the area. The drone pool in your area has a
>everything do with the kind of queens you raise. If you get
>queens from away, and some are bad, they will add their drones to
>the pool and you will get many more lousy queens as will those in
>your area. Keep at it and you never excape the cycle. It is not
>regression but normal bee biology. You continue to introduce
>outside queens, you continue to intoduce good and bad behavior.

I think there are a couple of issues that need to be understood in the
"emergency queen" debate. One of the topics covered at this summers EAS
meeting was "Queen Cell Biology". On of the key points, that agrees with
your point, is that very often the "emergency" cells were found to have
exausted their royal jelly before hatching. This is in contrast to other
cells where dry jelly was left at the bottom.

This will mean underfeed larvae. The queens developed from these cells will
never bee as good as one that had its fill, with some left over. But David
keeps talking about this "regresive" behavior, which one would think would
require a genetic answer. How can we explain this?

My thoughts are that part of the "emergency" problem is that the bees are
going to raise a queen that, like the old queen that leaves with the swarm,
is just a stop gap. Here pheremone levels are going to bee low and she will
be a target for supercedure. I think (based on some of my own observations
of walk away splits) that within a few days of her starting to lay the bees
may begin a supercedure cell.

The "why" behind the regressive behavior claims would be inbreeding. Your
source of drones for this two queen cycle is going to be very stable.
Therefore the second queen of the "emergency" cycle is going to have a good
chance of mating with (a) close relative(s) of her father.

I am wondering if the fact that a queen breeder is claiming the problem to
be much worse for him is due to what would otherwise be good breeding
practices (that is good outside of the emergency cycle). The breeder selects
his drone mothers and saturates his mating area with their sons. For queens
being sold this is great. A high density of good quality fathers for the
bees that will be born in the customers hives. But in the emergency cycle, a
very high chance of inbreeding.

For the non-breeder the drones are spread out in a more random fassion. Each
hive adds a few to the pool. If you have enough hives in a given area the
spread should be close to random. The chances of inbreeding are reduced. If
you are moving hives a lot then you improve this even more.

Just my thoughts.