All the FGMO/varroa thread and this one has got me to thinking about our observations compared to what is actually happening. We take the local happenings in our apiary and make them universal without understanding why. I get completely opposite results than David. My bees are gentler, more productive and healthier than when I started and they are all so called emergency queens. So is my truth stronger than anothers? No. I have different local circumstances. I have come to the conclusion that emergency queens are inferior if raised at any time other than a major honey flow. Nothing new here. But I have arrived at another conclusion. Emergency queens are inferior if there are large numbers of feral colonies or lousy beekeepers in the area. The drone pool in your area has a everything do with the kind of queens you raise. If you get queens from away, and some are bad, they will add their drones to the pool and you will get many more lousy queens as will those in your area. Keep at it and you never excape the cycle. It is not regression but normal bee biology. You continue to introduce outside queens, you continue to intoduce good and bad behavior. But, by growing my own over the past eight years, especially through the great varroa killoff when most in my area lost their hives and never started again, we have a fairly uniform drone pool, since there are only a couple of beekeepers in the area. If they have good bees, I will have good bees. When bad bees start to populate the area, my bees will also pick up the characteristics. If they grow their own, we will have a fairly uniform set of bees until bees become varroa tolerant and feral bees migrate in or lots of outside queens are introduced. It is interesting that I was taught from the beginning not to raise my own queens by the emergency method because of regression. Maybe we have never been actually seeing regression but normal bee biology by the introduction of agression or poor honey gathering by the local feral, lousy beekeeper, or store bought queen drone pool. Bill Truesdell