>I read your post with interest and tried to follow the study as best I could.  The main message for me was “the longer the queen was in the mating nuc, the better she will perform”.  Maybe I’m juggling the results a bit but I have never successfully introduced a mated queen into a colony in my 40+ years as a beekeeper.  By success I include, she isn’t superseded several weeks after introduction.  

I thought this study would eventually be quoted.  From my perspective it was not true of my queen rearing operation.  We caught on a 14 day cycle as long as they were laying and rarely had complaints.  I also had honey hives out there which we requeened with our marked queens.  We requeened on an annual basis and I can say that I would have at least 80 % of the introduced marked queens in the hives after 12 months which is in stark contrast to the quoted study.  The unfortunate part is that needing to make a living I did not have the time to write up these results and publish them at the time.

If you go into the study you find there are some problems.  The data shows that they were requeening hives that obviously had virgin queens in them which they did not find.  We know that a  virgin queen will knock off an introduced queen.

They caught queens at 14 days that were not laying.  I know this because the queen breeder involved told me and had suggested that these queens not be caught but as it was a strict timetable they were caught.

As for Bob's comment about requeening, here in Australia it is the most common way to introduce laying queens.  We do get some misses but not many.  The only time we would have supersedure problems was if the hive had a high Nosema count. Another reason for early supersedure is that the queen has been banked for more than 28 days.  We did not bank our queens.  We know from a banking study here in Australia many years ago that if you use a queen that has been banked for more than 28 days it will be accepted but then be superseded after a few weeks.

Trevor Weatherhead
Australia

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