>The problem with this whole question is that workers lay eggs, so the finding of an egg in a place where no queen has access won't prove anything. What interested me about the piece from Bee Craft, 1950 was that the author had _seen_ a bee with eggs in his mandibles,

As I previously posted I have on a rare few occasions found a VIABLE mature queen cell above the excluder with no other brood of any kind. So either a bee moved an egg or larva or ???. A worker egg would obviously result in a drone if allowed to develop. I also recall seeing a photo of a worker with an egg in her mandibles in one of the journals quite a while back, probably more than a decade and I don't remember if it was BC or ABJ. Doing a search is beyond my ability but maybe someone can find it. 

Predrag's article post was most interesting and inferred that egg movement was quite common at least for the method of queen production described. Raises in my mind that I can't say that I have ever seen an egg in an undeveloped cup. It could well be from lack of looking but what I always see is the "bell" shaped cell already stocked with jelly. So do we know for a fact that queens lay into cup cells? If eggs are routinely moved it opens a whole set of questions as to what bees do the moving of what eggs. We know that they have familiar bias. Interesting questions.  

Paul Hosticka
Dayton WA

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