> ...Poland.  A beekeeper showed me a home-made, double-chamber
> queen cage.  The two chambers were separated by #4 mesh.  The
> 'bait' chamber contained a mature queen, the other one was empty
> except for a screened cone entrance.

> The idea is that the resident queen will seek to find and kill the
> caged queen.

Gee, I'd hazard that we all wish it were that simple.  :)

Here at Farmageddon, we've spent lots of time and money on pheromones,
tiny circuits that faithfully reproduce queen piping, even an approach
identical to the one mentioned, using both live and recently dispatched
queens, all to no consistent avail.  We did have some apparent "successes",
but they had to be admitted to be "random luck", as we could not duplicate
the results consistently.

While a method that would make "finding the queen" easier would be
a serious advance to the state of the art, a laying queen does not
seek out, not does she "fight" an introduced mated queen or virgin.

Virgins will seek out other virgins, or unhatched queens, but a mated
and laying queen is herded about by her attendants like a cow on a rope.

The worker bees in a queenright hive are the bees who will attack,
maim, and kill a newly-introduced queen.  But even this reaction is
inconsistent. Sometimes, yes.  Sometimes not.

> The beekeeper said he typically gets the resident queen
> within 24 hours.

Try it yourself, and see.  You'll get a trap full of workers.
(You'll need to enlarge the small-end opening on a standard
cone to allow a queen to enter, and you'll likely want an
unmodified standard cone to allow the workers to exit the trap,
or you will see the thing fill with workers in short order.)

One finding as a result of our work was more evidence that there
are a lot more 2-queen hives than many beekeepers suspect.  This
may have a lot to do with "introduction problems", as who would
think to keep looking for a second queen after one has "found"
the first?  Well, now we think of it.

But if (as I suspect) somewhere between 2% and 5% of all hives
have two laying queens co-existing, it follows that laying queens
are more likely to have a Cup of Tea than a Coup d'Etat.

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