Swarming and memory

[beeno]

which leads to my next question ... I've always shied away from reintroducing the swarm immediately back to its parent hive with its stay at home occupants. Have I been daft all this time, and does a clear out of QCs and virgin queens render it acceptable to all?

Hi,
Well, I worked on the principle of 'fight or flee' (why bees make those decisions are not clear as far as the literature is concerned?) and the fact that they had swarmed twice. Swarming instinct had thus been satisfied IMHO. Also, there were two queens in the swarm, one they did not want to enter the nuc with, so I removed her. In addition I removed all the QC 's in the parent colony and was 99% sure there weren't any other virgins, so no reason to flee IMHO.
Incidentally, this was a colony which was under observation, just to see what happens, with the 'just leave them to it supersedure principle'. Left with one supersedure cell and marked old queen. Swarmed three weeks later on 3 prime QC and six emergency cells, 3 scrub queens and a queen the one kept. No sign of marked queen. Needless to say I will never leave them to it again.