BBKA Forum

British Beekeepers Association Official Forum 

  • Queen cell conundrum

  • Beginners forum, ask beekeeping related questions and get help from other experienced beekeepers. Please use the Search Feature please to avoid duplicated threads
Beginners forum, ask beekeeping related questions and get help from other experienced beekeepers. Please use the Search Feature please to avoid duplicated threads
 #11258  by RHumphrey
 18 Jun 2021, 11:23
I have a hive with 15-20 queen cells on frame fronts and 2-5 QCs on the bottom. This is puzzling me. The history is as follows.

05/05/21 - QCs present in colony ready to swarm so split hive leaving only one unsealed QC due to be sealed - frame position marked. Old queen, some brood frames, nurse bees and stores moved into a nuc. Gaps in donor hive replaced with foundation frames. Plenty of space and super space.
12/05/21 - The unsealed QC now sealed. Any new QCs destroyed.
26/05/21 - Just a brief check but confirmation that the Q had emerged as cell has opened.
10/06/21 - First observation of larvae and sealed brood. Great - queen has mated.
17/06/21 - NO eggs or larvae - only sealed brood. 15-20 sealed QCs on faces of brood frames and 2-5 sealed QCs on bottom of frames.

I've assumed they have or are about to swarm and have destroyed all QCs and left just one. Hope this has been the correct decision. But I have some questions.

1. Surely there hasn't been enough time for sealed QCs to have been produced. Or has there?
2. Have larvae been used instead of eggs which is quicker?
3. If they are preparing to swarm, why didn't they use eggs to produce Qs?
4. If they have produced these QCs to swarm, were the conditions still too congested even after I split the colony?

There doesn't seem to be a reduction in the bee population you might find after a swarm - though I am only in my second year so not exactly full of experience!

Please help - I"m mystified!!
 #11259  by Patrick
 18 Jun 2021, 14:36
Hi and welcome to the Forum.

Good post, the dates are really useful .What I would guess from that number out of the faces of the combs is they are emergency cells. Do they look a bit short and stubby and like mini acorns?

They were raised from eggs and larvae from your new queen which was presumably killed either by the bees or in the course of the inspection on the 10/06. Please don't think I am being rude about your handling - I had exactly the same happen to me on a big colony earlier this year I put onto double brood and by the next week queen gone and emergency cells everywhere - very annoying! I can only conclude she got clobbered as a result of my hive manipulations - its uncommon but can happen.

Yes they can have sealed emergncy qc's in under a week. Its unlikely they will swarm on emergency cells but I would still reduce down to the best looking one or two personally.
 #11260  by AdamD
 18 Jun 2021, 15:12
Welcome to the forum,
For your 10th June inspection, you don't say whether there were eggs or not, however by 17th there was no open brood and only sealed queencells. Queens will swarm before a queencell is sealed, however a young one is unlikely to swarm so quickly after starting to lay. The timing could work out OK if the queen was failing and then died. Sometimes (not often in my experience) queens start to lay and fail or are rejected quickly for some reason.

Worker brood is 3 days as egg, 6 days open and 12 days sealed.
Queen brood is 3 days as egg, 5 days open and 8 days sealed.

Hopefully a new queen will emerge soon enough and mate successfully.

(A similar thing to you possibly; Last year I saw that a queen had mated and was laying OK. A couple of weeks later I only found sealed brood and no queencells. On the floor (of the nuc) I saw the queen, disabled and unable to walk. Did she fail or did I damage her when I inspected? I don't think so and there was no apparent sign of damage to her, however there was enough queen pheromone to inhibit queencell construction).
 #11263  by NigelP
 18 Jun 2021, 18:54
Just to add bees don't simply use eggs to make queen cells, they add royal jelly to larvae from between 1-3 days after the egg "hatches". The earlier and more royal jelly the larvae receive the better the queen (or so they say).
In a queen cup an egg is laid and then as it hatches royal jelly is added (or just before it hatches).
When beekeepers graft larvae for generating queen cells they use ones approx. 24 hours old or less.
If the hatched larvae doesn't receive royal jelly but normal brood food it becomes a worker.