I have been spending alot of time reading this post and the other post about direct release or not, and I guess that I am baffled that this is such a hot issue to debate.

I don't get it. :scratch: All this talk about dangling the cage. Why would anyone do that in a foundationless hive? There are at least two good places to put the queen cage without hanging it up. If you are using a foundationless framed hive, why not just remove a few frames from the center, place the queen cage on top of the bottom bars of a few frames to either side of the vacancy, and then pour in the bees and put all the frames back in? OR, if using a top bar hive without a screened bottom, as is the case with most Kenya hives, why not just lay the queen cage on the bottom of the hive? It will be weeks or at least several days before the queen cage will interfere with anything in the hive....if ever!
I never direct release anymore, but I always use a small nail to carve a tunnel through the queen candy in the cage to help speed up the release. Actually, I do that just to be sure that the bees understand how to get her out of there. If they can't see the queen through the candy, they might spend all their time trying to figure out how to get to her through the metal screen.
I see absolutely no benefit to direct releasing a queen. If you're working with a new hive and package, there isn't anywhere for her to lay anyway, so what good does it do to let her out? As I see it, direct releasing a queen into a new hive with a package does nothing more than greatly increase the chances that the whole bunch of them will abscond. The bees need a reason to stay in their new home until they realize that it's an OK place to live, and a caged queen is a darn good reason to stay.
While a few hundred bees worry about releasing the queen, the rest of the thousands are foraging, feeding, building comb and settling in because they know that their queen is there. The fact that she is in the hive is all that they care about. By the time the queen gets released, the vast majority of the package is quite comfortable in the new hive, which most likely makes the queen feel comfortable there, too.
I just think that putting 12 thousand confused bees into a strange new home and then making it so they should feel free to bail out is a very bad idea.:doh:
Chris Harvey--Teakwood Organics
www.thewarrestore.com