Hi Mike I’m not sure if you mean early stage larvae in normal cells or queen cells. Early stage larvae will always be accompanied with a milky substance (royal jelly). In any case queen cells will always be more developed than a play cup, therefore break them down in the process.
An led torch can be handy at finding eggs or young larvae.
OK I am really confused there are a lot of bees in my lower Bird box completely full and shallow if that’s what you call it smaller box on top there is 2 1/2 frames that are empty hi I’m not sure if I should split the hive put the flow frame on top. Not sure if anyone is willing but I would really love to speak to someone over the phone you can call me if you have time it is 6:30 PM EST at
(347) 680-0642
Sorry for the auto correction hopefully you know what I’m trying to say.
Hi Mike, I don’t have an affordable phone plan for overseas calls, however my wife, who just went out for a few hours, says we can talk for free on Facebook. I don’t know how to do that. We can do that at the same time tomorrow when she’s home, if that suits you.
The only advice I can give would be to hold off adding the Flow super if the bees still want to swarm, because you don’t want to be taking it off every time you want to do a brood check.
Once you are satisfied that the colony no longer wants to swarm, then add the Flow super, provided the brood box is at least 80% full.
Thank you so much Jeff, I don’t have Facebook well I did have Facebook but not anymore not sure what happened I think I was hacked. How about a zoom link which is free and I use it all the time for meetings etc. whatever time works for you let me know I can send you a zoom link. The only thing I would need you to do is email me so this way I can send you a zoom link. My email address is Msmartliving@msn.com.
It’s amazing how I can’t get any one local to give me a hand. Thank goodness for this forum.
You’re welcome Mike. I’ll get Wilma to organize that when she gets home. We should be able to do something at a similar time tomorrow.
While scrolling back over this thread, I noticed that link @Dawn_SD provided. In the meantime, a good idea would be to do a good study of that. I can only tell you what I do in my sub-tropical climate, while using a single brood box.
Yes the information that Dawn, provided was very helpful. Not sure what it maybe the lack of experience is what is getting in the way. I am not so concerned about getting honey this season I just want to make sure my hives thrives.
That’s interesting how you say that the newly emerged queen kills the other queen cells after her mating flights. I thought (or may have just assumed) that she did straight after emerging.
She probably could if the nurse bees would let her. However, they seem to cluster over queen cells and protect them until there is enough queen pheromone from a mated queen with good ovarioles to make them give up their vigil. I imagine that it is a survival trait, selected by evolution. I will try to find a reference
Yes, that does make sense. However, I imagine chaos as there is about a week between the new queen emerging and returning mated, seemingly plenty of time for more queens to emerge(?).
Would love to learn the details, thanks for looking.
You are probably right, and that may well be why most experienced beekeepers don’t inspect a hive for a couple of weeks after a new queen has emerged. During that time period, the insecure nurse bees will happily ball (and kill) any queen that they are unsure of, if the hive is disturbed. Bees are tricky things 
I did some reading today on virgin queens; In my 1978 version of the “ABC and XYZ of Bee Culture”, they say that virgin queens fight it out shortly after emerging. They chew holes in the sides of unemerged queens before stinging them. Nurse bees do the rest.
There’s no mention of bees fighting it out after mating flights.
I read something interesting, just two days after a personal observation. I was confused because a colony had a full sized yellow queen, however no recent eggs, which is what I was needing. Upon further inspection I discovered a brood frame with a heap of what I thought was emergency queens, where one had already emerged. I couldn’t work out why the virgin queen I saw was so long in the abdomen. As it turns out, after reading, a newly emerged queen is light in color, as mine was, & also nearly as long as a fully mated queen. Then after about 3 days, they trim down to the normal size of a virgin that we are familiar with. Also they get darker in color.
Talk about a co-incidence, the timing of this part of the discussion couldn’t have been better.
I wasn’t surprised to see the bees making emergency queens because I’d been in & out of that hive quite a bit, using it as a resource hive. I may have accidentally killed the queen, or she got balled during one of my visits.
PS @Dawn_SD , in the video, City of the Bees, they show a virgin queen emerging, then shortly after, engaging in a death struggle with another virgin queen. These photos Wilma took show the long abdomens of the virgin queens. Maybe they need long abdomens at the beginning to assist with the death struggles.
Needless to say, I can’t find the exact reference that I read (it was quite a while ago, and I didn’t bookmark it), but there are some other interesting articles here:
http://honeybee.drawwing.org/book/queen-cell-destruction
I suppose this may happened when the workers allow several queens to release at once, and they are all the same age. However in most hives, queen cells are slightly different ages. The second link is a paper which studied the timing of destruction of queen cells by virgin queens. Apparently they go for the most mature cells first. Presumably they then have time to go on a mating flight before another competitor emerges.
In a queen less hive, it must also be in the interests of the hive for some queen cells to be left viable, in case the queen does not return from her mating flight.
Ah. I only have the 1937 Edition… 
Considering that it takes over 30 minutes for the emerged virgin queen to chew through the side of a queen cell, I would imagine that she needs some help taking the exposed larva apart. Otherwise she would never get around all of the mature cells, and she would never get mated!
My 1945 Edition of Snelgrove’s queen-rearing does say that nurse bees can hold mature queens in their cells for up to 4 days or longer, and help the queen survive by chewing a very small hole in the cap, introducing some food and then resealing it. They then stand guard over the sealed queen until the decision is made to release her, or dispatch her. 
Hi Dawn, I can’t see any reference to queens mating before destroying other queen cells or fighting with other queens in the first link. I didn’t read the second one on account of the cookies.
I’m still convinced that everything is sorted out before mating flights. It would be ideal for a colony to have a backup plan in case the virgin queen doesn’t return from mating, however that is a luxury that colonies don’t have, in my view. That accounts for the roughly one in 7 chance of a new queen failure, which is about my failure rate. I had 3 to check the other day. Two were queen-rite, one wasn’t, which is the reason why I was needing a frame with fertile eggs.
Getting back to the long abdomen during the first 3 days from emerging: It makes sense to me that the long abdomen would help a queen to fight with, compared to a queen more than 3 days old, with a trimmed down abdomen.
While that would be logical, I read in Snelgrove’s book today (and I think it is in Root’s ABC to XYZ as well) that the abdomen is longer to start with because new queens are very moist. As they dry out after emerging, they shrink down, so that they can be very difficult to tell from a worker until mated. So much to know!
Hi Dawn, I agree there’s so much to know.
I’m constantly looking at how things work in the natural world & why things happen. One example is a queen’s barbless sting. She needs a barbless sting so she doesn’t die after stinging another queen.
Another example is how bees target the source of the co2 we breathe out. It leads them to the sensitive parts on our face where a sting will have the greatest impact, seeing as she only has one chance to make that impact.
Edit @Dawn_SD Even after stinging, a bee continues to hassle us, I believe for a reason, & that is to make us breathe heavier, making it easier for her sisters to continue stinging us where it hurts the most.
I think that the fact that approximately one in seven queens fail could be a good thing in the natural world, otherwise a hive will continue indefinitely, with the combs getting older & older, with no prospect of getting renewed. When a hive dies out, wax moths, cockroaches etc. eventually turn the dead hive into a pile of soil at the internal base of the tree, while cleaning the cavity right out, ready for a new swarm in the coming season to restart the process with new combs.
I love your thinking and theories Jeff! Sound good to me 
Hi All,
Update from when my bees swarmed on June 5th. Quick recap, when I open the hive and was going through the brood box I found several capped queen cells and found no queen in the hive. About 2 weeks later I looked in the hive again and still found several capped queen cells and found no queen.
So the question was do we split the hive, do we pick The best looking queen cell and get rid of the other ones so we decided to let them sort it out on their own.
Today, I went back in the hive and found two queen cells that appeared that the queens hatched from and the other queen cells looked like a bees removed the Dead queens from the cells. So we continue to look through the hive and when we got to the 3rd to last frame my wife yelled there is the queen sure enough when I flip the frame over there she was long live the queen.
We had 2 brood boxes 1 deep 10 Frame and 1 shallow 10 frame brood box. In the past the Santa frames on the shallow brood box had larvae and capped cells.
Today the shallow brood box where we once had capped cells had nothing but honey. So we decided to remove the shallow brood box and work with 1 brood box and added the flow super on today.
Question,
Now that we know we have a queen I did not notice any eggs or larvae yet is it still too soon?
When should I reinspect?
This is what my girls are doing now
Hi Mike. You should start to see new eggs & larvae any day now. Maybe you should look again in 7 days time. Look on the frames with the most bee activity.
I had a mentee with me today. I put a frame with eggs into a colony with a poor performing queen (after killing the queen & placing her body back in the hive) on the 3rd of June. Today, the 3rd of July, we inspected the hive, to find the first worker brood to get sealed over. I explained how with the timelines of the colony raising emergency queens, the queens sorting out who the victor is, mating flights, then egg laying, one month is about spot-on for finding the first worker brood to get sealed over. Then you know she’s successfully mated
