Hi,
I have an interest in observation hives and have kept one in our house for
several years. Last year I videoed some very interesting behaviour when the
first queen emerged after swarming.

Basically the bees seemed to restrict the access of the free virgin queen
to the remaining queen cells and were very rough on her. Also the remaining
queens seemed to be confined within their cells. A lot of piping was going
on from these confined queens.

This year I wished to see exactly what was going on and try to video a
queen piping within a cell. I got the hive to the point of swarming and
just as the first Q cells were sealed I carefully cut them out and cut a
rectangular slot down the side about 4mm x 12mm. I then fused the cell to a
pre prepared cover slide that would offer low thermal inertia, and inserted
three such cells back into the hive. The grubs were not physically harmed
by this operation, as there was plenty of space around the grub at that
stage. The atmosphere within the cell would be lost but I figured that as
the cell capping is porous this was not significant.

I filmed the pupae’s rapidly changing into mature queens without any
apparent problem. Disappointingly there was little piping, so that will
have to wait until next year.

On emerging all the queens were killed by balling which took a long time.
Up to five days before death.

On a second attempt my first impressions of queen confinement was
confirmed.  By distracting the surrounding worker bees using of a small
scented probe tainted with Fabi Spray repellent allowed the confined queen
to emerge/escape immediately.

This possibly explains why so many beekeepers have witnessed emerging
queens, and why it is good advice to leave alone until the queens have
emerged naturally.

I have all this on video.

Q?. Has anyone got any ideas about this, as I cannot find this phenomenon
documented anywhere?

Best Regards,
Graham Law
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