> Having killed the queen  and destroyed the emergency cells you can put all
> back together and requeen or share it out to finish the brood.  Usually all
> aggression disappears within a day of the death of the queen.
 
This implies the queen produces an odor or something that makes bees
aggressive.  Is this true? If the aggressiveness was genetic it would take
several weeks to disappear, if environmental requeening would have no effect
until whatever was wrong was fixed.
 
I am curious about this since two years ago I had 2 hives next to each other,
one was gentle while the others were the meanest mothers I've ever seen.
AHB seemed to be more desirable than those ladies!  They just laughed at
smoke, too.
 
What was odd was those bees had a supposedly "gentle" Midnite queen.  I don't
know if that queen was superseded since I wasn't ever able to find her while
under attack.  I finally just united them with the gentle colony in the fall as
both were sort of weak (for the mean colony, probably because all its bees died
trying to sting me :-) ).  Fortunately the gentle queen "won".
 
-Mike