a Peter Borst snip... 
We always caged the queens as soon as there were eggs. Never waited to see the pattern. Always had enough queen cells so that a cell went in the very next day, no delays. Most queens were sold in April and May so to wait two weeks for a pattern would be the loss of the sale of tens of thousands of queens.

my comments...
without a doubt folks do this in differing ways.  when I sold queens (in very small numbers and without any advertisement) I waited until there was a nice brood pattern and the first cells had began to be capped.  some folks like my good neighbor to the south (BWeaver) normally does the same thing at least on the first couple of rounds of queen rearing since this allows you to NOT have to restock the small mating nuc boxes on each round of queen cells.  imho no matter what the size of queen rearing operation having enough cells is never the limitation.  at almost all scales queen rearing is a fairly labor intensive and detail oriented operation.

Peter seems to suggest above that economic consideration were more important than producing a quality product for whomever he was working for...  constant replacing of failed queens and drone laying queens is I would guess a considerable expense if you catch queens early and no one can place a value on the loss of customer good will.

Gene
Central Texas     

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