Queen Cell Production

[MrILoveTheAnts]

I opened my hive today to do a split. I was having a hard time finding the right brood to do it too. The youngest brood I found was just forming a "C" in the cell, I'm hoping I just over looked some eggs in the frames too. In my looking I discovered 2 queen cells starting to be made. My hive is fairly large, but they haven't swarmed yet. I don't think I have a mite problem and the queen was about 2 years old. I didn't find the queen, which is nothing new, but I tore my hive apart and was only able to find one frame with brood that even looked close to maybe producing a queen. The rest of the capped brooded seemed to be 2/3's workers and 1/3's Drones.

As I understand it the workers would only produce queen cells in the absence of a queen, after they swarm. Is this correct, is my queen dead, should I cancel my split?

[tig]

the produce queen cells for many reasons...for a reproductive swarm, for supercedure.  if you didnt see any eggs or very young larva maybe they superceded the queen. they usually make the queen cells BEFORE they swarm.

[Brian D. Bray]

Cells that are in the very start of being made are called cups.  Bees build cups for making queens even when they have no intention of swarming because something might happen to the queen.  If you find capped cells in a hive chances are the bees have already swarmed and removing the cells kills the replacement queen--don't remove queen cells--you use them to start nucs or splits.

If the larvae have laid down the their side and started to grown they are usually to old for developing into a queen sucessfully.  Eggs still on end are new-3 days old and can be used for making queens.  After 3 days the larvae forms and chances of creating a queen are very much depleted.