a Geoff Manning question... 

What has this to do with supersedure cells?

my comment... 
This seems to require a small population in a box and some variation in day to night time temperature swings.  I have witnessed this several times (originally in 5 frame medium depth nucs) and realized after the fact that about a week earlier when checking for a laying queen I had shuffled one outside frame with a few bees attached to the other side of the cluster. At the time of the reshuffle I had not noticed any eggs or larvae but in dim light/shade eggs can be hard to see.   A small group of bees seems to have gotten stranded on one side of the frame when the temperature dropped and they then begin drawing one cell on the outside frame. By the time I caught the cell it was capped and there was a small group of larvae around the queen cell.  At the time I knocked down the cell(s) and the existing queen continued to preform quite adequately.

In the purest sense what I describe above might be considered an emergency and not a supersedure cell.

I now just look a bit harder and try to be a bit more cautious about shuffling frames. I do suspect even beyond this particular incidents described above that environmental things (ups and downs in temperature and nectar flows) can transpire to create the condition for what looks like a supersedure cells when there is nothing really wrong with the exiting existing queen.  

Gene in central Texas... 

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