Mark Franklin Almond wrote:
Dear Mark:
It depends. If you are installing a commercial queen, the best thing to
do is to suspend the queen between two frames in the "brood chamber" and
let the bees free the queen by eating the candy that is keeping her in
the cage.  By the time that takes to eat the candy, the bees have
adapted to the pheromones of the new queen and she is "home free."
I breed most of my queens in nuclei and isolate each queen in a nucleus
with one or two frames of honey with bees.  When I am ready to introduce
the new queen into a colony I use the "newspaper method" placing the
queen with the two frames right above the brood chamber.  If I have
supers to place above that, I place a newspaper sheet below and above
the box containing the new queen.  Three days later I go back and check
to see if the new queen has been accepted and remove the box that
contained the new queen and the remains of the newspaper.  This two
methods have
worked well for me for many years.  I have used another method in which
the queen is isolated within a wire cage attached to a brood frame.  In
this case the queen must have been mated before it is inserted into the
colony because the method depends on the queen beginning to lay while
she is caged hence the rest of the colony will accept their new queen
readily when the wire cage is removed.  This method is a little bit more
complicated and requires a bit more experience.
I hope that my contribution is clear enough to be of help to you.
Please do not hesitate to ask me for more details should you be in need
of more information.
Best regards.
Dr. Rodriguez
Virginia Beach, VA (USA)