19/05/2026
All about queen cells….
Worker bees make queens by choosing a decent sized fertilised egg and feeding the hatching larvae with huge amounts of top quality royal jelly they produce from glands in their head and jaws.
A supersedure cell is made when they want to replace the queen without swarming. Typically two cells are together in the middle of the comb. Here the one on the left looks like it emerged first, the bees have started to take it down and recycle the wax. The one on the right probably came out later, you can see the frayed edges at the bottom where it chewed its way out. One of them will go out to mate, the other would be killed by either the other new queen or the workers.
If they are happy with the new queen and how well she has mated they will stop feeding the original queen and then bump her off.
The swarm cell has a fat larva glistening with jelly. The bees made a cup that looks like an acorn cup jutting off the comb to make a larger cell to fit a bigger larva. The queen lays a fertilised egg in this, the workers feed it until it can be capped to pupate like a caterpillar chrysalis. Half the bees will then leave the hive with the old queen and find somewhere new to live. The new queen will emerge and mate and continue the colony. Often they make numerous swarm cells, with smaller caste swarms leaving with an unmated queen to find a new home.
If a queen hasn’t mated well due to poor weather or not finding enough males, she lays only male eggs. In this case the bees try to make a queen out of the only larvae they have, but being male they won’t be queens, just well fed males. You can tell they are only males by the larger bullet shaped cells on the comb, as drones are larger than workers. I gave this colony some eggs and larvae from another colony but they didn’t recognise the pheromone smell and didn’t make queens out of fertilised eggs. They would only dwindle and die so I shook them out to beg their way into nearby hives.
An emergency cell is made when the queen is no longer present to lay in a queen cup, and so they use larvae in normal comb that would have been a worker. These can still provide decent queens.
So, now you know!
Let’s hope they manage to have good weather, find plenty of males to mate with and head a strong colony through the summer and into winter.
