Serious-all-the-time folks are going to hate this post. The setting: The queen in the University of Guam observation hive (which I maintain when I'm here during the winter) had quit laying. The queen in their companion full-sized hive had reduced her rate of egg laying after her second year. The obvious solution to both problems was the move the two year old queen into th OH, where slow laying is an asset, and buy a new queen from Kona for the big hive. In preparation, we inspected the big hive and discovered an empty queen cell with its end open. The bees had beaten us to the requeening. But on the next frame was the marked two year old queen! This was my first encounter with a situation often cited in the literature where a new queen will tolerate the old dowager queen. So I moved a couple of frames of brood with stores and bees into the OH and put BOTH queens in with them, after marking the new queen, of course. I can just imagine explaining this to the kids after having just taught them that a hive has only one queen! Providing that they both coexist in the two frame hive as they did in the ten frame one. Dan __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Photos - Share your holiday photos online! http://photos.yahoo.com/