Cam Bishop posted:
              >.  I've haven't observed rigorously, but it appears to me that some queens are simply more attractive than others, as is commonly                       >observed with caged queens

>Anyone who has banked queens has seen this, even with virgins.

Just a quick aside followed by a question: we noticed differing reactions when ripe queen cells were laid on the top bars of prepared mating nucs. Some of the cells were ignored, but some garnered immediate attention, workers massing and migrating from all over the hive, even in a couple of cases making a big, unusual humming sound.

All the mating nucs had a stick of artificial queen mandibular pheromone in them (to hold the initial seeding of bees in the mating nucs overnight before introducing the ripe queen cells)....so as far as we could manage, none were more queen hungry than the next.

I have also seen workers defending an un-emerged queen cell from emerged virgins....and upon checking later found that the queen who won was not one of the virgins I saw. 

It seems the bees know things about queen cells and queens that we do not (and we already know they make deliberate choices about which worker eggs to raise as queens)...which leads to my question.

We are going into our second year of queen rearing with a view to identifying the top performers and breeding from them the following season. We are thinking: should we put two ripe queen cells into every mating nuc, with the idea that the bees will then do some degree of "proofing" for us by backing what they think will be the superior queen?

We'd appreciate reactions to that idea/advice.

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