Our new Russian queens arrive on Wednesday May 16th. We purchased these from Coy’s out of Mississippi, who are part of the Russian queen breeders group. These queens are already mated and since they only run Russians in there queen yards, they most likely have mated with Russian drones. Not as pure blood as AI, but as close as you can get naturaly. We are wanting to use these to raise Russian Hybrid queens to use in our own yard, and also to sell. We took them out on Thursday and made up 4 nucs using bees from the 4 Italian packages we installed a month ago. We have heard that introducing a Russian queen to Italian bees can be a challenge. Seems many people have had an issue with the Italians not wanting to accept the Russian queen. With this in mind we decided we would utilize a queen introduction frame this time. We figured this gives us control of when she is released and it also opens up more area for her to spread her pheromones around and maybe it would help with the transition. With these frames you install the standard queen cage into the frame and it is connected via a hole so that she can leave that cage and get into the screened area of the frame. There is a cork on the top of the frame that you can remove once you are convinced she has been accepted, and she can make her way out into the hive. You then remove the introduction frame from the hive and it should be up and running. Hopefully it works that easy. We’ll do an update once we have them introduced.