Fellow Beekeepers, We have talked about multiple queens in the same brood chamber. I'm only a beeginner, and have only raised one queen that I know of (it was an accident). But it seems to me that there is a great advantage to smoking in a virgin queen into a colony with an existing laying queen. There is no mating hive to mess with. Building, maintaining, stocking, feeding, and storing mating nucs sounds like a genuine nuisance. It is probably a necessary evil for those who sell queens. But for your own queens, which you are going to plant in your colonies anyway, why not introduce them directly as virgins? If I understand right, the virgin queen emerges from the cell into a cage. (in a cell-finisher colony). You remove the cage with the new queen and approach the hive to be re-queened. (You mark the queen.) You smoke the hive heavily through the bottom entrance, open it up and let the virgin queen out of the cage. The heavy smoking fouls the bees sense of smell so that the old queen and the workers accept the new virgin. She mates and takes up her motherly duties. There is no down time as the new queen gets started. Dee, is that correct? I know you have written about this in the past. Could you give us the URL reference? What is the success rate? How can we fail? I imagine you lose a few new queens on their mating flights. Thank you for sharing this technique with us. Kyle