Dear All, Some notes on queens shipped in banks: *care must be taken to provide enough soft (but not runny) queen candy for the attendants. *some banks are shipped with wet sponges which tend to dry out during transit. *sometimes, not enough young bee attendants are shaken into the bank. A couple of years ago, I received 1 or 2 JZBZ queen banks with about 120 queens. These were shipped from California, the wrong way around the world, to Manila here in the Philippines. The route was: Los Angeles, somewhere in the MidWest, New York, Amsterdam, Japan, Manila. This took all of 3 days. Upon arrival, the sponge had dried out, all the attendants were clustered aroung the hardened queen candy, the queens had shrunk. I did all I could with a few fresh made queen banks from strong colonies, fresh candy, water, etc. When the queens regained strength and size, I promptly introduced them into weak nucs with lots of just hatched bees. The queens failed, superseded and died off. Less than 10 did well. Joel F. Magsaysay ILOG MARIA HONEYBEE FARMS KM. 47, Aguinaldo Highway, Lalaan 1 Silang, Cavite [log in to unmask] 046 - 865 - 0018 (digitel landline)