a Charles Linder snip... 
Part of that will be where they come from.  Some suppliers use excluders,  some shake by hand.   It may be counterintuitive,  but I suspect those that use excluders will have more virgins than those shaking by hand.

my comments...
I would suggest it depends on how the bees are shaken into the bulk container and in my own experience most 'normal sized' virgin can not squeeze themselves thru a queen excluder (ie it is the thorax and not the abdomen that does not allow a proper sized queen to pass thru the excluder).  Certainly some smaller queens (and I would suspect queens of african hybrid origin) can but anyone who has shaken a good deal of packages has also removed  or killed lots of virgins that do not fit thru a queen excluder.  Of course anyone who has shaken packages knows to check the excluder material real well before package shaking begins.

I would wager that a smoke up box likely means less queens or virgins end up in the bulk container and therefore less in the package.  If you drive bees thru excluders (vs the smoke up box) you do get a few queens and a few virgins in the packages but these often get there by flying and not by squeezing themselves thru an excluder.

Recently I went down to my good friends BWeavers to see their new store and I caught two queens on a large stack of packages shipped indirectly out of California.  I made a comment to Laura Weaver at the time that my time was better spent catching queen on the outside of their equipment than in rearing my own queens.

Gene in central Texas  

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