Queen cells and virgin queens

[JDI]

I have a hive that I requeened about 4 weeks ago with a great cordovan queen. However, the bees didn't think so. They have been building 4-5 supercedure cells each week which I have continued to destroy. The last time I did so was 9 days ago. I went out to check all my hives yesterday and requeen the rest of them. I found that that particular hive had 81 supercedure cells. All were in the typical middle to top of the frame location, small cells drawn from a worker cell. It looked a whole lot more like the bees were queenless than superceding. However, I found the queen and an enormous amount of brood. She really is an outstanding queen. Her laying pattern is excellent and so I thought I could use the queen cells to requeen my 5 frame nucs, all of which have queens 2 years or older. I want to keep only queens which are cordovan and so after cutting out the queen cells I picked 20 and put them in homemade roller cages and stuck them in a really strong queenless nuc. I figure after they hatch I can choose only the cordovan queens to place in nucs. I realize that this is a long story to ask a few simple questions but here goes- How long can I keep a virgin queen caged. After removing queens from my nucs can I just put the virgin queen in a queen cage and expect the bees to accept her? Thank you for the help.

James

PS. When I got there yesterday I found out that 5 acres of land (edge of a forest) hand burned the day before including the land that 3 of my hives sat on. There were no trees or grass left but my hives looked completely fine except for one corner of a lower brood box on one. All 3 are on 2 cinder blocks and the fire burned right under them right between the blocks. The other hives were right on the edge of where the fire stopped and it was still smouldering when I got there yesterday. 7 fire departments cooperated in putting it out. I just wanted to thank all the firemen out there. If it wasn't for them I would not likely have any bees. Turns out they were dumping water on my hives to keep them wet.
Thanks,
James

[clintonbemrose]

If you keep virgin queens for longer than about 12 days they may never do their mating flight so they will become Drone layers.
Clint

[Michael Bush]

81 supercedure cells? Are you sure they are queen cells?

[JDI]

They were all capped bigger than drone cells with the ends pointed down. I brought home about 15 or so and can take a picture. I will email it to you if your email is in your profile. But I can't imagine they are anything else. If you queen hadn't been present I would say emergency queen cells. If the brood nest is too large do they build emergency queen cells? This is my largest hive and has 2 deep brood boxes, 2 medium brood boxes and 4 honey supers on it. The queen has laid in the four bottom boxes but unfortunately the outer frames had capped honey in them. I moved all brood frames as low as I could Friday and brought the honey up hoping that consolidating the brood nest might help in honey storage. All the cells were in the top two medium brood boxes. If your profile doesn't contain your email address just email me at JamesDIreland(remove this part)@hotmail.com. I certainly wouldn't mind a second opinion. I'll go take a photo.

[JDI]

Michael, you should have the pictures in your email box at this point. I sent them as 2 separate emails (unintentionally). Let me know your opinion if you will. Thanks, James

[Michael Bush]

One picture is pretty clear, the other two are a bit out of focus. All of them look like you cut out a section of comb. Is this correct? I didn't see any capped queen cells. I saw some drone cells and, on the one that was in focus, what appeared to be two queen cups, one torn open with the royal jelly showing and the other I couldn't see anything in it, but maybe there is.

I'm still not that certain what to think. Do you have any capped queen cells? I have still never seen a hive with anywhere NEAR 81 queen cells. A really booming hive that is really itching to swarm will sometimes make 20 or 30 swarm cells. But I've never seen more than five or six supercedure cells.

[JDI]

In two of the pictures there should have been 5 queen cells present showing them capped (there were 5 per side). The pictures seemed clear on this end- it is a great camera. I may be able to convert them to a different format but it sounds like they may still take a while to download if done by dial up. The third picture shows some cells and queen pupa removed with the royal jelly plug at the bottom (not early queen cells as, you thought). Doesn't matter now. 14 of the 20 cells I saved have hatched already and they are definitely queens. The others will hopefully hatch in the next few days. About half are the cordovans I wanted. All I can think is that my brood nest got stretched out too much and the bees in the upper part (where most of the cells were) thought they were queenless. Other than number, I don't know that you can tell a difference between supercedure cells and emergency queen cells (unless EQC are made in groups and sometimes immediately adjacent to each other-which these were). They certainly weren't the pretty queen cells that are made for swarming. I hope they are still good queens- I will just be using them for nucs to draw out comb. I will get into the hive the cells came from again tomorrow and remove any queen cells I find. I will let you know what I find.

[jalal]

81 is quite a number.

I'd love to be able to reproduce those results!

*EXPESSUALLY IF THEY ARE SUPERCEDURE*

(I've always had the best of luck with supercedure cells)

[JDI]

I thought they were supercedure cells in the beginning only because I had been removing supercedure cells each week. But due to the number they must be emergency queen cells, even though the queen is still in the hive. She may not be making any or enough queen pheromone. Has anybody got any reasons I shouldn't use these queens in my nucs? They don't appear any smaller than virgin queens out of a normal swarm cell despite the enormous difference in size of the two types of cells. I have the virgin queens in homemade roller cages for now but will transfer them into nucs in queen cages over the next week for mating.

[JDI]

BTW, if anyone else would like to see the pictures I can email them to you. It is a typical segment of comb that I cut out of the end of a medium frame to remove 5 queen cells together. When I turned it over I found that there were 5 queen cells on the other side, as well. It apparently takes a long time to download by dial up but by dsl or cable should be quick. Just email me at JamesDIreland(remove this part)@hotmail.com

[Robert Brenchley]

Why remove supersedure cells? If they're attempting to supersede, it suggests that the queen is faulty. Why did you think they were dupersedure rather than swarm cells? I'd be glad to see the pics.