Coleen, You state that you put new queen in a split of bees and capped brood. Capped brood doe not hold any NURSE bees. Requeening a colony that is mostly FORAGER age bees is always tough and often results in non-acceptance. If you had introduced a new queen to practically all NURSE bees, you would probably get 98% acceptance. Why SPRAY with sugar water and then leave them with no sugar syrup feed? Awfully hard on the morale of the bees, particularly when you are STRESSING them by attempted requeening. Forget the spray, and just keep the bees in contact with a jar of 1:1 sugar syrup over the inner cover hole will be FAR more successful. I ASSUME that you TESTED the split before adding the queen cage that there was no queen presence (like a virgin queen) in the split, because if you did not TEST and there was a virgin queen present, of course you new queen is killed. "Two women in the same house is WAR", Confucius say. Trying always to be safe, and not screw up my bees, I always TEST for a queen before I combine, requeen, etc.; just by adding a frame of eggs or 6-8 hour old larvae to the colony for 48 hours before. If they make an emergency cell of the face of the comb of the larva frame, the colony is queenLESS, but if there is NO emergency cell, that colony has a queen "presence" somewhere, either a hiding queen, a virgin queen, or a laying worker (anyone of which is a queen "presence" I hope I have helped. Remember me, I went to University of Michigan 1940-44 George W. Imirie Certified EAS Master Beekeeper Beginning my 70th year of beekeeping in Maryland Author of George's Pink Pages