an Aaron Morris snip followed by > my comment... 
Again, expediently reported queen problems got replacement queens. My
frustration is with people who wait to 4 or 5 weeks to report problems,
hence my question, "Does a date ever arrive when the buyer of packages
waits too long and forfeits replacement expectations?"

>Of course some problems with packages and queens will not show up immediately.  This does not seem to be the underlying cause in your description of your problem. I am GUESSING here that you distributed a lot of packages and some clients are just now reporting back to you problems???? Some (many I would guess) Package Producers only produce packages for a give period of time and then they are done... often having moved the operation 1000 miles north and at that point the labor force is focused on either pollination or honey. < decades ago when working for an outfit that produced packages that were sold thru the farm edition of the Sears and Roebuck catalogue this is exactly the larger problem we faced... ie packages season was done and then customers would complain of problems with their packages...

>Lots of stuff can go wrong with producing queens (which is an understatement for all of us folks who do that)... Weather is often the largest risk plus the quality of the final product rest heavily in the hands of the person catching and caging the queen.  Good, reliable and experience helps really means any defective young queens are culled, but only if the owner has a policy to not ship obviously defective queens.  

>On a personal note....Last fall we obtained about 50 queens from California for the Texas A&M Bee Lab.  At the insistence of the Dr Rangel we acquired these from Northern California at the height of their problems with heat and fire. The end results was in no way positive (perhaps in someways predicable) and you could witness this almost from the front side in that queens very poorly accepted and those banked (for me typically in a queen less unit) began dying at an alarming rate... basically unattended by the workers in the bank.

Gene in Central Texas..

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