"It was the thinking of my employer (a second generation beekeeping who ran about 5000 hives) that on the last round of package shaking the seller had simply caught up every queen in the queen excluder basket that looked anything like a midnight and sold it as a new queen."

Presented as evidence,  a third party unverified suspicion,  with no documentation, ability to to question or verify,  becomes what is known as hearsay...

My point is simple.  Acusations are being made with no evidence other than  "the looked like older queens"  what does that mean?  I have been at this a long time and am quite sure its hard to tell the age of a queen,  and just as hard to if not harder to tell quality.  Some new queens lay poorly  as well as overaged queens.  More to it than just looking at a queen and proclaiming "shes old"  and accusing the package producer of scamming.

As for kidding,  absolutely not.  I shake fall packages from a friend and overwinter.  Those queens do just fine,  we also make splits in July  from our last years queens.  The majority of them do fantastic.  Never done the math but I would guess the percentage is about as good as the replacements we set.  All that matters is the queen is kept at a good temp,  and she lays like crazy when placed.


Just my opinion, and not worth a lot,  but to me if your buying packages and nucs constantly,  you may not be the best judge of bee age and quality.  If it were possible to grade and age a queen at a glance this business would be easyier.


Attempting to tarnish the reputations of a group of fine people because of something you saw in sear and roebuck decades ago is a bit odd and vindictive in my opinion.

Charles

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