> The amount of royal jelly
> that is placed into the cell before it is capped may be a very good
> indicator of how good a queen that hatched.
>
> Queen cells that were produced for swarming or supercedure had so much
> royal jelly in them that after the queen emerged, a good deal of dry
> residue was still in the bottom of the cell. Cells from emergency queens
> often have all of the jelly consumed by the larvae.

Virtually all grafted queens are raised in a queenless condition in response to
queenlessness, and must thus be considered, IMO, emergency queens.

There are several factors besides the mode, whether swarm, supercedure, or
emergency, which determine the amount and quality of feed given to a queen
larva.  One is the general environment at the time; in poor weather or out of
season, bees do not feed larvae as well as when there is an abundance of nectar
and pollen.  (Nonetheless, heavy flow conditions are not good for getting good
queens either).  Another important factor is the number of young, healthy bees
that are available to feed the queen larvae.

Most swarming takes place under ideal conditions for raising young bees, thus
the cells raised have a good reputation, except for the genetics question.

Supercedure can take place under a variety of conditions, and I should think
that the amount of food given the cells would be dependant on the same factors
as in raising queens.  The fact that supercedure often takes place under
conditions of reduced queen performance, when the amount of open brood is being
reduced may tend to increase the likelihood of adequate food being provided, as
does the (typically) small number of supercedure cells made.

The amount of food in queen cells initiated as a result of human intervention is
always a concern.  I have seen commercial queen cells which we purchased, arrive
without an excess of royal jelly apparent.  As mentioned here before many times,
this is easy to see in a JZBZ cell up. I have also seen this flaw on occasion in
cells we have raised ourselves; this is a major fault that is easily observed.
Cells without an apparent surplus after pupation should really be discarded, but
I wonder how often they are.  The problem is that the person who raised the
cells wants to believe that, by some stroke of luck, *exactly* the correct
amount was fed, thus the cell has no surplus -- and not the obvious truth: that
the queen could have consumed more and is hungry.

I have wondered what the consequence of underfeeding at the very *end* of the
larval stage is.  I have wondered whether it simply results in a newly hatched
queen which is fully grown and developed, but which has an empty stomach and
which falls over a few moments after hatching unless fed immediately, or an
underdeveloped, undersized queen.  I have definitely seen the former -- and also
the latter, but I do not know the cause(s).

> I wonder if this could put the issue of queen quality in a different light.
> The emergency queens have run out of food in the capped cell. The other
> queens had all they needed, and then some.

I believe this is a factor.  I think emergency cells have a bad reputation in
some quarters for a number of reasons.

* One is that some bees do not raise emergency cells well.  We see this when we
select hives for cell building for grafted queens.  Not all hives will build
queen cells promptly and in numbers.

* Another is that bad timing can be a problem, or that poor colonies are
selected for emergency cell rearing.  As a result, the cells are poorly fed.
This does not happen with swarm cells, almost by definition.  Supercedure cells
can cover quite a gamut.  I've seen some pretty pathetic ones.

> Could this be a result of the
> bees having a longer period to fill the cell before capping? Could a few
> hours time give the bees enough time to add enough jelly to end up with a
> good queen? If so the difference between a workable emergency queen and a
> poor one could be the result of small differences in the way the bees have
> fed the larvae.

I don't think so.  As I said before, all the commercial queens you buy are
emergency queens, and they seem to be well fed, if the queen supplier is
scrupulous.  Only if an older larva is selected by the bees -- or the person
grafting -- does this become a question. Apparently this does happen in some
situations, definitely if no other choice is available, and also possibly with
some types of bees or environment.  Older larvae are already well on their way
to becoming workers, and do not make good queens no matter how much they are
fed.

> I also wonder if bees tend to chose brood of full sisters for the new
> queen?

AFAIK, the research to prove this theory is pretty questionable at the moment
(see the logs).  As with many bee phenomena, the original research may have been
accurate, but replication has been a problem -- I believe. People try to
generalise behaviours over vast and varied bee populations in widely differernt
locales, and what may be observed in one place with one population, may not be
observed elsewhere.  Apparently this is not a universal phenomenon.

allen