> Allen said: I have seen some, too, but usually those runty emergency 
> queens we recall seeing are ones raised at inopportune times by weakened 
> hives
> under stress.

What be see is influenced by what we have heard.   Queen suppliers naturally 
would not like to believe that beekeepers can get just as good results on 
average by just making splits as by buying their products.

The bee press has a strong bias to those with the advertising dollars, and 
also the scientific community, despite their best efforts find their funding 
is biased towards solutions which produce profits for somebody influential.

As with all things, the free alternatives are often overlooked or considered 
second-rate simply because nobody gets paid to promote them.

I am expecting everyone who does walk-away splits to send me 2c each time 
they do one from now on, just to make them feel better about not goosing the 
monetary economy by buying queens, having them shipped and writing checks so 
the banks can get their slice and survive another day.  (Of course, I can 
accept larger amounts, even right up to the ten or twenty dollars they would 
normally squander on a store-bought queen).

> Allen, this would be typical in a situation where broodright mating nucs 
> don't accept a cell.  The nuc simply might not contain larvae of the right 
> age.  In your situation with walkaways, success would depend upon whether 
> both boxes of the splits contained freshly hatched larvae.

Well, they are just nucs, too, not entire colonies.  Mating nucs tend to 
either be run down or bursting and plugged.

And as I say, we remember the times there is a tiny, runty queen or two 
running around, not the times that the emergency queen does just fine, and 
we mistake her for the queen we expected from our cell.

Just so you know, though, I did order a queen from the Mraz outfit years 
ago, and  I still can recall that it was a runt, to my eyes.  They said not 
to worry.  I can't recall if it filled out after being installed.  Maybe it 
died.  I was a terrible beekeeper back then. 

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