a Peter Borst snip follow > by my comments...
I don't agree with any of this. 

1) numbers do matter, otherwise we are not talking about facts but BS.

2) 200 poor queens, replaced by 200 worse queens, those numbers would matter to me, not to mention the waste of time.

3) packages are not fake swarms. A queen in a package should last as long as a queen in a divide made any other way. Queen failure is a consequence of commercial queen rearing practices. In fact, most mast production methods produce inferior products: compare store bought fruit to home raised.

>reports of poor queens and poor packages coming out of Georgia has been passed around for quite some time. if you attend national meeting and talks with fairly serious (and often scientific leaning) small scale beekeeper you can quickly get an ear full of reports of large and across the board failure of packages, nucs and queens.  all of this is of course is by word of mouth but when you hear folks report 100% failure it lead at least me to believe something is terrible wrong.

>a package looks something like a swarm but that is where the similarities are suppose to end.  a package 'should have' a new queen and 2 to 4 # of adult workers.  most swarms will contain about the same # of bees and 'normally' at least a two year old queen.  with a swarm you should expect the queens mandibular pheromone to be constantly growing weaker and for her to be replaced before the end of that season.  quite often replacement happens quite quickly.  

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