On the related subject of disappointing package queens: I have acquired package queens, mailed queens, and locally bought queens over the years. Some were amazing, some were gone in two weeks. It is, for various reasons, always a crap shoot when you buy queens. And even if the supplier has an unlimited policy of replacing dud queens, how will the replacement queens be any better than the ones you got in the first place?

The queens who have been most reliable are the ones I make myself and the ones I see my other beekeeping colleagues make for themselves. You get to control so many of the variables...who was her mamma, how healthy the cell building colony was (including their forage), how well that colony fed her as a developing larva, how well stocked was the local DCA, did she get to start laying when she wanted to, was she spared shipping/holding stressors etc. 

We had such spectacular failures of package queens in our club in 2016 that we began a queen improvement project, which included asking all club members to raise extra, well fed drones in their best hives to help boost the local DCA's, advising the new-bees to raise a replacement queen themselves ASAP after acquiring a package and queen. We are moving toward all keeping nucs with new queens cooking along in our respective beeyards to have extra, well made queens available for anyone who runs into queen trouble in the season. A bit o' community based beekeeping/queen banking.

We are also trying to get club members into nuc production, even that's just one or two in the season, such that we can supply local bee demand with locally sourced bees...not just because the bees may be better at handling local conditions (since it is not so much the bees who are locally adapted, as the beekeepers)...but to eliminate any concern that diseases and pests will be shipped in with the spring packages.

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