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.  What was obvious to me was the queens in their introduction cages did have some age on them and were not 'fresh'.  My employer at the time seem to think that shipping those queens would lead to massive package failure and superscedure and consequently to the eventual replacement of the packages.  Although I will not reveal the name attached to this small bit of larceny I will tell you that they are still in the bee business and at least some more recent evidence suggest to me they are still performing the same slight of hand.     



Interesting statement.   Totally possible, also 100% hearsay,  not to mention  pretty much irrelevant.  Does it matter where the age of the queen?  Any queen you get in a swarm is most assuredly a old queen,  and as such the mechanism of a swarm is to replace the queen after she goes to town for a few weeks.  Normal biology of a swarm.  A package is nothing but an artificial swarm.  Most replace queens very quickly,  as we have discussed here at length.  Been normal and documented for more than 50 years......  Documented in the ABC of bees......

The fact they are still in business is very telling.  Tells me they are providing a product that is working for the majority of customers.  This business is a small group.  Scammers don't last long.   AS for Nucs,  there are defiantly some scammers out there,  but the majority are not.

To throw out blanket accusations such as that is totally uncalled for and off base.  Are their some bad actors?  Sure.  Just like academia,  how many teachers are having relations with students??  Not right to  put the profession in question for a bad actor or two.


To do it unprovoked, because your not sure why you lost queens???  Not to mention the comment on farmers in the same thread........


Charles
    

  

             

             ***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software.  For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html