Will queen start laying again?

[shoefly]

Scenario: About four weeks ago, I put a bought queen in a hive that had been queenless for some time. When I recently checked, she had layed a nice brood pattern on two frames. All the worker brood was capped and she was walking about apparently healthy. In the two frames of brood were a couple of, what appears, meakly looking emergency queen cells. There was no open brood except for a few drone cells that had not been capped yet. Did this queen stop laying because she is sick? Are the emergency queen cells an indication that this queen is done for or should I give her more time to start laying again?
Your kind advice is appreciated.

[power napper]

If the workers made emergency queen cells then the queen needs replaced in their eyes. Happens all the time, maybe the queen was not mated well enough and can no longer lay fertilized eggs, maybe she got injured, maybe ???.It happens!

[Finman]

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According Australian research hives change new queen easily if queen is under 2 weeks in mating nuc after mating. To post queen makes bees change 30% of queens.

When I byed queens from Italy they were all changed during one month. This happened during 3 years.

There are many more reasons why they change the queen.

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[shoefly]

Yes. The other background to this question is that I was curious what these odd looking emergency cells were and started poking around in them. The one queen I saw was almost ready to hatch but what a mini-queen it was. So now I have a nice fat queen that is apparently not laying and no potential mini-supercedure-queen to replace her. Should I pinch the existing queen and introduce a new one? ...or is there still hope that the old queen stops being Snowhite - aka coughs up the poisoned apple and starts being a laying queen again.

[tecumseh]

an unmated queen is 'almost' alarmingly small. give her one to two weeks to make and begin laying and she fills out to look like your standard issue queen...plump and prolific. my experience is that once a queen has ceased laying and a hive is constructing emergency cells then her days as being describes as your highness are over.

I take it by your description that you poked around on all the emergency cells? without young larvae they now have no resources to remake a queen. so I would think you options are to either buy another queen or to combine this hive with another. in considering these two options my main concern would be: how strong is the hive and how much time do you have before fall arrives?

good luck...

[shoefly]

Bummer! Sounds like a case for re-queening.

Once, I let the observation hive successfully raise one of these mini emergency-queens. She is not much larger than a worker and at first I did not recognize her as a queen, she was so small. She doesn't seem to get bigger either. I think the queen size is pretty much set once they are mated.

[shoefly]

Sometimes patience or a fortuitous event pays off. I didn't get to requeen and when I looked back in - sure enough the old queen had started laying again beautifully.

[Rob S]

I have 1 hive in Memphis TN. Got the queen in April of this year. She has done well. Rookie as I am...I thought something was wrong with her when she slowed down during the summer heat. So I panic'd and ordered a new one. My mentor checked the hive and said everything is fine. He saw new eggs that were really really small. Even when he showed them to me I could hardly see them. The new queen came in almost dead and died the next day. So no action was taken. If they want to supercedure a new queen...I don't think I should stop them.