Queen acceptance

[AdamD]

The following 'paper assesses the acceptance rate of virgin queens being introduced to a colony.

https://cjas.agriculturejournals.cz/art ... lonies.php

There's quite a lot of information here, one is that introducing queens from different races - ligustica/carniolan/buckfast had no bearing of success. It's generally accepted that it can be difficult to introduce queens from a different race compared to our own colony, but this would appear to be false.

[B1B2]

Very young virgins (a few hrs) are better than older ones.

[MickBBKA]

'Buckfast' a race
Pure bred mongrel at best

[NigelP]

Why not strain? As mule sheep are an accepted breed but are a cross between a Bluefaced Leicester ram and a purebred hill (or mountain) ewe (usually a Swaledale sheep).
In fact there are probably more strains of Buckfast than any other type of bee due to Brother Adams breeding programmes developing several differentstrains of Buckfast bees.
Super bee would another good way to describe them

[AdamD]

Flavour of bee?

Interestingly the 'paper suggests that requeening a colony of laying workers is possible by introducing a virgin with a >50% sucess rate. It's something worth considering in the future as it's not something I have tried. What does work is to move the colony away and leave a queen in a hive with no brood on the site of the LW colony so it's just the flyers that return and generally accept the queen. Nigel I think you do this with any bad tempered stocks, I recall? But presumably with mated queens?

If there is a dearth of nectar when I want to add a queen, I will feed a colony as this 'paper indicates, as feeding will help queen acceptance. We don't want the bees to be hangry when a new queen is put in.

[NigelP]

Yes, always with a mated queen. I rarely have access to virgin queens, except by accident.
If I don't have spare nucs to ue I will just stick a frame with eggs in so the flyers regress and raise a new queen.