Garrett: Let me tell you my experience with them and how I solved the introduction problem. Lets start at the begining: the pheramone of the Russian Queen is not different it's "a lot different". I got a bunch of this queens to try last year but I was already awared of the fact that they were harder to introduce, so this is what I did: the queens arrived in the plastic type of cages that have the sugar plug at the bottom and it's part of the cage, I removed about 3/8 of an inch of sugar from the shaft and I stuck a little stick in there that would fit real tight so that the bees cannot remove it. Then I put all the cages in the hive to be requeened (already took the original queens out) and left them there for 4 days, then I came back and released each queen from my fingers to the top of the frames full of bees to observe them and be able to grab the queen if she got attacked, non of them did. I came back 2 weeks later and they were all OK and laying eggs. They didn't start laying right away like all the other races I have tried and used, some of the queens took a week before they started to lay. 2 weeks later they were all doing good and 4 weeks later they all had black bees in the hive, meaning non of them got killed and the eggs that were hatching were in fact the Russian babies. This year when I was splitting, last year's queens were still there, I know because they all had the wings cut (I cut them myself before releasing them). I did this in late May last year the hive were strong and full of working adults and I did not loose any of the Russian queens from introduction. Good luck Maurice Utah, USA _________________________________________________________________ Join the world’s largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail. http://www.hotmail.com