As one might suppose, the quality of emergency queens is not simply a matter of the bees raising queens from a bunch of different eggs and letting the first (and worst) come out and rule. While they do use eggs and larvae of different ages, they then proceed to destroy a lot of them, suggesting that they are "evaluating' them in some fashion. According to work by Dave Tarpy, et al., bees seem to prefer queens raised from older eggs versus either those from younger eggs or older larvae. (quoted material): Selection of high-quality queens by the workers during queen development has been demonstrated by Hatch et al. (1999), who found that during emergency queen rearing workers preferentially destroyed queen cells built from older worker larvae. Workers destroyed 53% of the queen cells that they initiated. Despite selective behavior by the workers during queen rearing, considerable variation in quality exists among newly emerged adult queens. This variation in quality among queens gives workers the opportunity to benefit by selecting high quality queens that are fully developed, when the decision will be most accurate. Honeybee workers interact with queens extensively following queen emergence and may affect the outcomes of queen duels in favor of high-quality queens. SEE: The influence of queen age and quality during queen replacement in honeybee colonies DAVID R. TARPY, SHANTI HATCH & DAVID J. C. FLETCHER Worker regulation of emergency queen rearing in honey bee colonies S. Hatch, D.R.Tarpy, and D.J.C. Fletcher *********************************************** The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html