>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.