Guilfordbeekeepers.org

so....I recently installed a pack of bees into a new hive. After a few days I opened the hive to see if the queen was released and found that the candy was completely eaten and the queen was dead in her cage. Being new to beekeeping, I got pretty anxious . It was a very sunny but not particularly warm day (55ish), and I didn't take the time to check the hive to see if there was another queen already there. My supplier graciously gave me a new queen, which I installed (and did so very quickly) within an hour. To install the new queen, I followed the same procedures as one would when installing a new pack: pull the cork from the candy end, place the queen cage in the hive, etc. My question is - assuming the colony was indeed without a queen, should I have NOT pulled the cork and instead gave the colony extra time to get used to the new queen before pulling the cork?

If the weather cooperates, I'm going to go back in to check on things this weekend. Thanks!

Sounds to me like you did fine. If they were queenless, the lack of pheromones from the original queen and the candy to be removed should give plenty of time for your package to accept the queen. If the original package had ignored the caged queen and made no effort to remove the candy, I would be more suspicious about a queen being shaken in with your package.