Bill Truesdell asks a question about what happens if Emergency Cell queens
are replaced by Supercedure Cell queens.

I've never known that to occur.  I use marked queens all the time and when
queens appear that are not marked I note it in my field note book and mark
the new queen.  If the queen doesn't do well I replace her thinking that you
can't get a good queen from a poor one.  (But maybe I'm wrong about that.  I
know of no research on the subject.)  I find that emergency queens don't
last long, I either replace them, combine the colony with another one, or
they are replaced when I requeen the following year with my two queen
system.  Poor queens aren't worth keeping, the colony usually winters
poorly.

I have been thinking that if the queen cell doesn't have any royal jelly in
it when the queen emerges, when did she run out of food?  If she ran out of
food, what did that do to her development and quality?  Does it affect her
behavior and performance as an adult?  Is she capable of achieving ideal
body size and weight, full ovary development, full pheromone production,
etc., etc.?

Bill says he continually makes new queens by the emergency method and has
been rewarded with better and better queens.  I wonder.

When making splits with brood and eggs and letting the bees raise their own
queens I have observed that different colonies build queen cells
differently.  Some start immediately, some wait for a day or more before
starting cells.  Some have cells with nearly the same aged larvae, others
have cells with a range of larval age.  The cell sizes, and placement on the
comb are variable within a colony and between colonies.  Some build one or
two large cells, others build a few large cells and the rest are what I call
emergency cells.  Some build only small cells.  A few don't build cells at
all or only cell cups.

I don't think queen quality is based on when the bees make a queen so much
as on their behavior triggered by queen pheromone levels in the colony, or
lack thereof, age of the nurse bees, available nutrition, and on their
genetics.  I've seen large supercedure cells and emergency cells in the
dearth period after orchard bloom, during the honey flow, and I've also seen
them both in the fall after the honey flow.

It appears to me that bee behavior in raising queen cells is quite variable,
much like the characteristics of colonies from the same line of bees from a
breeder.

James C. Bach
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