>
> >My skepticism of growing good queens from "walk away splits has lessened
> considerably..


Dito here, John.  From this discussion, it appears to me that the key
ingredient is that the bees have very young larvae available from which to
rear emergency queens.  If your splits lack such larvae, the bees may be
forced to use whatever older larvae are at hand.

This could explain what I see when I make up hundreds of nucs each spring,
generally containing two frames of brood each.  In the cases where the bees,
for whatever reason, rear emergency queens, rather than the inserted queen
cell, it may be that those that later produce small intercaste queens simply
didn't have very young larvae available.

Randy Oliver

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