> sometimes its no more than lost bees and the excited swarm pheromones being the attractant.

Further evidence that the lost bees orientation is affected more by orientation scent than queen pheromone:

Boch and Morse (1974) showed that worker honey bees from dequeened swarms, when given a choice between their own and a foreign queen, moved to their own queen in 32 of 34 trials. In a few instances, including the 2 where the swarms moved to the foreign queen, a citrus honey flow had been in progress. We suspected that the strong orange flower scent in the nectar might have interfered with the bees' ability to distinguish between the queens. This paper gives the results of our test of that hypothesis. 

We have also reported that, upon finding their own queen, nearby workers expose their scent glands and, by fanning with their wings, disperse the Nassanoff pheromone, which attracts more bees to the site (Morse and Boch 1971, Avitabile et al. 1975). In this paper we show that the release of artificial Nassanoff pheromone near a foreign queen attracts worker bees and induces the swarm to move to her rather than to their than to their own queen.

* Most swarms moved to the cage with the foreign queen and the artificial Nassanoff pheromone rather than to their own queen *

Boch, R., and R. A. Morse. "Effects of Artificial Odors and Pheromones on Queen Discrimination by Honey Bees (Apis mellifera L. 1)." Annals of the Entomological Society of America 74.1 (1981): 66-67.

See also:
Breed, Michael D. "Individual recognition and learning of queen odors by worker honeybees." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 78.4 (1981): 2635-2637.

PLB

             ***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software.  For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html