> Anyhow, the attendant bees or bees from the yard (can't recall) were
> thick on the US queen cages and sparse on the Primorsky cages.
>

It was the attendants in the battery box.  Sample size was 12 Russian, 12
domestic from a well known Florida breeder.  They were all over the US
stock, shunned the Russians.  I had a tough time getting the Russian queens
accepted and the colonies established.  I made up the nucs very lean
(small, fewer bees and brood than normal, left in the same yard so the
field bees returned to the original colony, leaving only young bees in the
nucs).  Set up in this manner, most of the queens were accepted, but the
nucs were so sparse that it took a long time for them to grow into
anything, and more than a few came down with chalkbrood, further
exacerbating their build up.  I will say all got over the chalkbrood, but
few reached successful over wintering proportions, and the few that made it
to the following spring amounted to anything.

It was not my first, but it was my last attempt to establish Russian hives
in my operation.

Aaron Morris - 150 hives, 40 years

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