Sorry, Robin, but I implied workers from the queenright
bottom half of the hive could migrate up through the queen
excluder over the hole in the inner cover and pass the
queen's pheromones on to the bees in the upper half.  Since
the pheromone levels in the upper half would be much reduced,
supercedure cells could be started there.  We were saying the
same thing, I believe.  Queens scent the comb with their foot
glands and bees pick up the queen scent by coming in contact
with her as well.

Having an excluder over the inner cover is important to me. I
once placed irregular brood combs from a feral colony in a
hive body over the inner cover on a regular colony and later
found that the queen had gone up through the inner cover hole
and laid up a big batch of eggs in the feral comb!  This only
prolonged how long I had to keep the feral comb on the hive.

In the induced supercedure scenario, if the queen went up, it
would most likely stop any queen cell building activity in
the upper section.

Waldemar
Long Island, NY

>From Robin: Waldemar implies that queen pheromone is
>airbourne.  As I remember reading/believe, queen pheromone is
>transmitted by contact - the queen leaves footprint pheromone
>wherever she patrols and the bees take pheromone off her body
>by licking (sounds delicious!). <...>

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