I haven't bought a queen in a long time, but learned from Wyatt Mangum at one of the NCSBA meetings that he had 100% success rate as long as he removed attendant bees from the queen cage. I tried it twice and both times the queen was accepted. Good enough proof for me.

 

If I make sure there is no queen in the hive, I seldom have any problems with introductions. I leave the attendants in unless I forsee a problem. A hot hive will sometimes reject a queen. A laying worker hive will almost always reject the first queen. A hive with a unkown virgin, will almost always reject a queen. I think most rejections are because there is a virgin in the hive.

 

I don't as a general rule remove attendants either. There's alot of reasons a hive will reject a queen, attendants in with the queen usually isn't one of them though. I've had hives tend to queens even though there was a laying queen in the hive already. Though in this case there wasn't any attendants in the cage with the queen.

 

>he had 100% success rate as long as he removed attendant bees from the queen cage.

So far, I've introduced around 10 queens in cages WITH the attendants left it and had 100% success. My experience would indicate it doesn't matter if you remove the attendants.

 

You may be right, George, but not being as experienced as you, I figured, as they say in that old joke, removing the attendants is like chicken soup: it can't hurt.

 

>removing the attendants is like chicken soup: it can't hurt.

Heh. You're right, it can't hurt. Somewhere I read a study, or read about a study done on queen introduction and the conclusion was that removing the attendants had no discernable effect on introduction success. As Peggjam said, there are lots of reasons an introduction might fail, but leaving attendants in the cage isn't one of them. And I happen to agree completely with Michael Bush- that most failed introductions are because of there being a virgin in the hive. I successfully introduced a caged queen to a hive that had started raising queen cells without my knowledge. My queen was accepted OK, but a week later a virgin emerged and killed her.

The trick to successful queen introductions seems to be not to hurry the process. For a cold introduction, I leave a caged queen in the hive 4-5 days at least before I even expose the candy, then it's usually another 3-4 days before she's released. With a package that has already spent some days cooped up with a caged queen I'd likely expose the candy right off. I've heard that you can just release a package queen right off, and it probably works most of the time... my favorite way to introduce a queen to a full sized hive is in a nuc with a newspaper combine. I have yet to try a push-in cage. When I start raising my own queens, I'll probably give that a try.