George Imirie wrote:
> About this time every year, I am plagued with people reporting exactly
what
> you said in your original message, they spend $10 bucks for a new queen,
> install her, and she is killed.

I set up a queen bank over 4 weeks ago in a small nuc using bees adhering to

combs of sealed brood only (or so I thought).  Left the bank set up until I
used
all the queend, the last of which I used to set the queen bank up as a
queenright
nucleus.  I figured with mostly young bees that had hatched from the capped
brood that the queen would be readily accepted.  A week later, no queen (I
mark
all my queens) and no eggs.  I figured it must have been the banking of all
those
queens that caused the nuc to reject the new queen.  So I tried again.  A
week
later, same thing: no marked queen, no eggs.  Figuring the third was the
charm
I tried one more time.  Checked yesterday and the queen was dead in the
cage!
I knew at that point there must be a queen in that nuc to have them reject 3
attempts, went searching and quickly found a nice, fat, unmarked, laying
queen!

The thing that's puzzling is the nuc never had eggs in the first place!  Yet
now
they have a queen!  I'm guessing there must have been eggs or young larvae
in the capped brood frames that I overlooked and the bees raised a queen
while
I had the bank set up.  But then why was my bank successful?  Perhaps my
timing was lucky in that I used up the queens from the bank before the
virgin
hatched and mated.  It'll be interesting to see how the new queen performs.

The moral is, even when you're sure there can be no virgin, check anyway.  I
didn't, assuming all that could be in that nuc was the banked queens.  The 3

week period of egglessness (actually it was 2+ weeks as there were eggs when

I searched yesterday) was the time it took the virgin queen to start laying.
I
never noticed the virgin when checking for the introduced queen because I
wasn't looking for one.  Never saw a queen cell because I didn't look while
the
queens were banked.  Never saw a hatched cell after the bank was empty, but
by
that time it may have been torn down.  Costly mistakes.

Aaron Morris - thinking just check it!