My first thought is, why did you try to requeen your hives? If your queens have as good a pattern as you say they do, what's the point?
The way you ask the question about who decides to requeen, the queen or the bees? Neither, they don't decide anything. this is important to understand. The colony is an organism. Who decides that your liver should function? Or better yet, which part of your body decides that it is time to void waste? There is no descision, it is a bodily function.
So is supercedure or in your words requeening. Though I think of requeening as something the beekeeper does to a colony in which the queen is inadequate.
So, supercedure. That is the colony organism's reaction to an inadequate queen, a queen that isn't laying enuf eggs, isn't giving off enuf trans 2-9 dycenoic acid, or something like that, aka queen pheremone.
Do I assume correctly that you knew which queens were the ones from cells and the others were the old queens is because the old queens were marked? had you gone through all of the colonies that you wanted to requeen and found the old (marked ) queen? I'm just thinking that supercedure may have happened and the new queens weren't from the cells that you gave the colonies. How would one know?
They may have killed your cells before they hatched. If they didn't need a new queen, why let it hatch?
The way you ask the question about who decides to requeen, the queen or the bees? Neither, they don't decide anything. this is important to understand. The colony is an organism. Who decides that your liver should function? Or better yet, which part of your body decides that it is time to void waste? There is no descision, it is a bodily function.
So is supercedure or in your words requeening. Though I think of requeening as something the beekeeper does to a colony in which the queen is inadequate.
So, supercedure. That is the colony organism's reaction to an inadequate queen, a queen that isn't laying enuf eggs, isn't giving off enuf trans 2-9 dycenoic acid, or something like that, aka queen pheremone.
Do I assume correctly that you knew which queens were the ones from cells and the others were the old queens is because the old queens were marked? had you gone through all of the colonies that you wanted to requeen and found the old (marked ) queen? I'm just thinking that supercedure may have happened and the new queens weren't from the cells that you gave the colonies. How would one know?
They may have killed your cells before they hatched. If they didn't need a new queen, why let it hatch?