Charles writes
> Seems to me there is a validity to both sides, obviously when a queen is missing the drift will be huge, but to Petes point sometimes its no more than lost bees and the excited swarm pheromones being the attractant.
I think Charles has made a very good point here: the orientation scent of the bees is stronger than the scent of the queens. This would account for why drifted bees snowball, as well, since the more bees there are, the stronger the orientation scent.
Winston and Slessor found that
The queen pheromone alone is not effective in attracting swarms to bait hives. Further, the addition of a QMP lure to a Nasonov lure of any composition does not increase attraction over Nasonov lures alone when bait hives are hung individually, separated by distances of 100m or more. However, side-by-side tests revealed a different pattern. In these experiments, Nasonov components alone were tested against mandibular pheromone/Nasonov attractants in bait hives hung within a few metres of each other.
The results showed that swarms preferred the combination of queen mandibular and Nasonov pheromones together over either blank bait hives or bait hives containing QMP or Nasonov pheromone alone. Workers in swarms may use the Nasonov pheromone as a long-distance attractant, but the presence of queen pheromone in a bait hive appears to attract workers into that hive when the swarm has arrived, possibly because workers are fooled into thinking their queen has entered the QMP-baited box.
The citral, geraniol, and nerolic acid Nasonov blend, in conjunction with synthetic queen mandibular pheromone, has given us the best success in our experiments in which more than one bait hive was located at a single trapping site.
Mark L Winston & Keith N Slessor (1993) Applications of Queen Honey Bee Mandibular Pheromone for Beekeeping and Crop Pollination, Bee World, 74:3, 111-128, DOI: 10.1080/0005772X.1993.11099171
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