Okay.  I'm getting pretty deep into this and it looks more and more as if
the bad press for emergency queens is largely superstition and
misunderstanding.  (I'm sure that this misunderstanding was not strongly
opposed and questioned by queen breeders).

I went to to A I Root's 1991 edition (2nd) of the ABC and can see where
the whole thing may have started.  BTW, he is a very lucid and delightful
writer; the pedantic prose that taints later editions is missing and he
writes from careful and keen observation.

Without quoting at length, he observes "...bees, especially when deprived
of their queens unnaturally, and broken up into small colonies, as
beginners are very apt to have them, in order to raise a queen, often
select a worker-larva so old that the queen raised from it is about half
worker and half queen."

and

"So far as I have been able to make out, these half-worker queens are the
result of trying to raise a queen when there are too few bees or when the
larvae with which they are obliged to rear a queen are too old: that is
too nearly ready to seal up.  Where they can do no better, they will
undertake to rear a queen from a larva only one day before sealing up..."

Manley has a poor opinion of emergency raised queens, but does not seem to
hagve tried them much.

The Hive and the Honeybee specifies that the bees will choose a day-old
larva.  The assumption is that such an egg is available.

Other texts seem indifferent on emergency queens and do not seem to treat
them specially.

In my own experience, emergency queens reared in the spring and when the
hives are well fed and populous normally are laying prolifically by 21
days after the dequeening that caused their production.

Moreover, there seems to be a pent-up recoil action that propels them
ahead, since the bees have had time to lay in good stores of pollen and
conserved their strength during the no-brood interval and the hives
rebound strongly.  If splits are made by breaking a two-storey hive in
two, the half with the new queen will usually go on to out-pace the half
with the old queen within six weeks.  The failure rate was quite low,
being about ten percent as I recall.

Why do I write this?  Well I just saw an email offer from the Argentinian
source that seems bent on underbidding everyone and driving the price to
rock bottom, and it was at 62.5c CANADIAN (That's 42c US, folks)  If that
is the current price of honey, I've gotta cut costs NOW, and one place to
look is at that $20,000 CAD worth of queens I was planning on...

allen


"If I make a living off it, that's great--but I come from a culture
where you're valued not so much by what you acquire but by what you
give away," -- Larry Wall (the inventor of Perl)