>
> >When I've done it I've gone back on the fourth day  and broken down sealed
> cells to prevent this. There are usually some.


I'm no queen producer, but I have raised about a thousand queens a year for
many years.  I have the same observation as Robert--that bees will indeed
raise queens from some older larvae.  And some sealed cells are quite small,
with small pupae.

We see this when we go through our 4-frame mating nucs.  If the cell didn't
take, and the bees raised emergency queens, some of those queens appear to
be small to the eye (I haven't weighed them).

I am speaking here of nucs with two frames of brood, so there may well be
limited choice of larvae for the bees to choose from.

This (poorer queens from walkaways) would not be a difficult hypothesis to
test.  Has anyone seen any actual data from a trial?

Randy Oliver

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