Hatched queen cell?

[Flyin Brian]

So without going into too much detail, this is a new hive from 4/2/16 that I thought was missing it's queen last week.  I did a check and could not find any larvae or eggs, so I went in my other hive and pulled a frame of brood and stuck it in here. 
I checked it today, fully expecting to find some queen cells.  Instead, I found eggs!  I'm wondering if maybe they superceded the package queen and last week she was still mating?
So I went through the frames and found this on a frame in the lower box:



Thanks!

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[Psparr]

That's just a queen cup. They have those on hand just in case they decide they need to replace the queen. No biggie. A hatched queen cell is much longer.

[BeeMaster2]

You probably have the original queen in the hive. When they are virgins they are hard to find.
I thought my virgin queen, that I had seen in my observation hive, did not make it back from her mating flight. I went so far as to add 2 frames of brood to it only to find eggs and larvae a few days later. By the way she must have started laying eggs before I added the frames.
Jim

[PhilK]

Seconded that I think you had a virgin. We had a nuc that by rights should have had a queen in it, assumed she didn't make it back from her mating flight, so added a frame of eggs. Inspection on the weekend showed eggs and young larvae, so we obviously just missed a virgin.

Question about the queen cups (sorry to hijack the thread) - worker bees make it, but why would a queen lay an egg in one? Does she know she isn't doing well/dying/underperforming so she lays an egg in there to be raised as a queen? Or do the bees take an eggs from a normal cell and transport it into the queen cup?

[Dallasbeek]

Your nuc SHOULD have had a mated queen, actually.

The queen doesn't question, I think.  There's a cup.  She lays an egg.  The bees feed it royal jelly.  THEN (and not before) it becomes a queen (provided another queen cell doesn't send forth a virgin queen first to snuff our little queen-to-bee). Life is truly cruel, yes?

[PhilK]

Your nuc SHOULD have had a mated queen, actually.

Yeah I know - we're not paying full price for that one!

The queen doesn't question, I think.  There's a cup.  She lays an egg.  The bees feed it royal jelly.  THEN (and not before) it becomes a queen (provided another queen cell doesn't send forth a virgin queen first to snuff our little queen-to-bee). Life is truly cruel, yes?

But there's usually not eggs in the queen cups, they're usually empty then torn down in my experience. So this would indicate the queen choses not to lay in there, wouldn't it? But sometimes she must because then they get turned into queen cells..?

[BeeMaster2]

From what I can tell the bees tell the queen to lay eggs in the queen cups. I do not think it is by accident.
Remember a queen measures every cell that she lays an egg in. She uses her fore legs to do the measurement. If it is a worker cell, she fertilizes the egg just before laying it. If it is a drone size cell she does not fertilize the egg. A queen cup is even larger than a drone cell and it hangs vertically. When she lays an egg in it, she fertilizes it.
The bees will remove eggs but they do not move eggs. If that was the case, they would not have to float a larvae out of a horizontal cell to create a vertical queen cell on the end of it.
Jim

[capt44]

Rule of thumb, when a queen emerges from the cell you will see eggs in 12 to 14 days.