A year ago I attended a talk by Michael Palmer.  He talked about making cell builders.  He had experienced a lot of problems with queens in cell builders even thou he had isolated the queen in the hive he was using for resources.  He said as a result he now ran all the bees thru a queen excluder when he made a cell builder.  The result was he had found that about 30% of his hives had two queens.

I have seen two queen hives.  Once I split a production hive.  I saw no swarm cells when I split it.  I thought I knew which half had the queen.  Three or four days later I checked both halves.  They both had a laying queen.  Another time I sold a nuc.  When I sell a nuc I move all the bees I can, the queen and four or five frames of brood into the new box.  The customer goes home with a lot of brood and enough bees to cover ten frames.  I put a frame of open brood and eggs in a box at the original position and all the rest of the combs from the nuc in that box.  There are nearly always enough field bees and stragglers to raise another queen.  Well, three or four days later I checked that box at the old site for emergency cells and it had a laying queen.  The customer also had a laying queen.

We often have a really productive queen that we would like to have in all our hives.  We wonder what happened that she is so good.  We wish they were all that good and rate the others as bad queens.  How often is that good hive a two queen hive and because of that a great performer yet both queens are pretty ordinary?  Is that part of the poor queen explanation?

I do think there is a difference between queens.  When I have purchased queens my experience has been one out of five is really a great performer and the hive builds fast and makes lots of honey.  Three in five are ordinary.  And one in five just can not seem to advance faster than a snails pace.  On my home grown queens I also see a few that are unusually good at growing the hive.  Maybe one in five.  And a lot that are ordinary.  Only a few are stragglers, but they sure happen.  I had one like that last year and one right now.  The slow ones never get better with age.  They also do not often get superseded in my experience.

Dick

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