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Do they ever let a drone "queen" hatch out? I had isolated a capped queen cell (built from a queen cup, not worker brood) into a Styrofoam mini mating nuc and waited for it to hatch. I only put a small handful of bees in there, and one or two were probably drones. From the bottom, I could see that the cell had properly hatched, but could never find a queen in the bunch. Still puzzled what might have happened in there. The capped queen cell in my display hive did the same thing. But when I opened my main hive to add those bees back in there, I found that the 3rd queen cell had hatched a real queen. Unfortunately, she never made it back from her mating flight, so my hive is still queenless.
