Either receive or a MessageListener will be asynchronous and will be called as soon as you receive a message.
you could control the pre-fetch size of your client.
Now, if all you need is to avoid the delay of poling every 500 ms, using a Queue system may be an overkill? It's perfect fine to use java.util.Queue (or any other subclass).
If all you need is to block until an element of a java.util.Queue is available, and you don't need distributed messaging, persistence or anything like you could simply using BlockingDequeue and your thread would unblock as soon as you have a message..
Look at this:
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/util/concurrent/BlockingDeque.html