Anne, A couple of thoughts in addition to the good advise/analysis so far.  I have used the strips as a queen sub to keep the populations stable in newly made-up mating nucs waiting for cells with some observed benefit. I doubt that they will do much to delay laying workers in a large colony. The best way to do that is with some fresh brood. Putting a frame of open brood and eggs in that is marked for easy identification will have two befits. First if you pull that frame after 48 hours and see no attempt to start emergency cells you can be pretty sure that a queen is present. Second if they do start cells you still have 14 days or so to remove them before introducing your new queen and they will all be on that one frame. Finally the new queen will be a new colony in a couple of months anyway, so the old beloved colony is now as you say next door. The best you could do to "keep" that colony would be to have the colony raise a new queen from her eggs. I trust that she would successfully mate if there are even a few colonys in the neighborhood. Good luck, and it's all moot if you now have a laying queen as could very well be the case.

Paul Hosticka
Dayton WA 

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