At times, Alberta beekeepers have purchased queenless packages with lures used as surrogate queens for colony  morale in transit and added their own queens from favoured sources on arrival.  At other times, they have killed the queens which came in the package and replaced them some time after installation when dissatisfied with the supplied queens.

As for the quality of the bulk bees in the package, I have seen cases where the bees in some packages shaken down under at end of season were so old they died off before the first brood hatched when installed in Canada.  Some hives were okay, but others seemingly came from queenless hives .  

My best results ever came from raising my own queens from my best eight hives from the previous season mated with drones from the best (can't recall) 80?  That appeared to raise our yield by something like 50% over our average.

             ***********************************************
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