Johno, I may be having this play out right now. One of my swarmed hives requeened, the eggs are deep and centered and the pattern is tight, but the bees are drawing the cell walls up like laying worker brood. There are some worker capped cells but still lots of the other. I am letting it be until this next round of queens are mated. Then I'll re evaluate.
Drone laying queen
I had my observation hive swarm a while ago and watched the appearance of the new queen. In due time she commenced laying in a pretty good pattern. Now when it came time to cap the brood the frames had wall to wall frames of drone brood obviously from an unmated queen. Now to change out the queen in an observation hive is not so easy so I just let it slide as I had many other more important things to do. About 3 weeks later there was more capped brood but flat like worker brood so I waited until the flat brood started to emerge and they were worker brood and now all the brood being capped is worker brood. So this queen started off her career as a drone layer and then somehow figured it all out and started to fertilize the eggs after a time went by. Makes me think that we may be a little hasty when we pinch that drone laying queen. Anybody ever come across this before.
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It is not an all that uncommon for a newly bred queen to lay drone brood for a wile. However when a Queen that has been laying a good worker pattern goes to laying drone brood exclusively, and particularly if she is doing so in worker comb. That is a different story altogether!
Had this happen a few weeks ago. She straightened out now but her destiny was touch and go for a couple weeks.
So this is far more common than i thought, If this queen was in one of my queen rearing nucs she would have been long gone.
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