Queen cells

deemann1 · May 28, 2017

I have got two queen cells on 2 frames 1 on each frame .
I was wondering do i leave the 2 cells alone or take one out .
My hive is queenless nearly 2 weeks

pargyle · May 28, 2017

deemann1 said:
I have got two queen cells on 2 frames 1 on each frame .
I was wondering do i leave the 2 cells alone or take one out .
My hive is queenless nearly 2 weeks

I would leave both of them .... the first one out will probably kill the other but if one of them is duff for any reason you double your chances of getting a viable queen by leaving both of them. I assume that these were emergency queens they had to make for some reason ? Very often emergency (scrub) queens are not the best they can make and they sometimes get superceded fairly quickly.

deemann1 · May 28, 2017

pargyle said:
I would leave both of them .... the first one out will probably kill the other but if one of them is duff for any reason you double your chances of getting a viable queen by leaving both of them. I assume that these were emergency queens they had to make for some reason ? Very often emergency (scrub) queens are not the best they can make and they sometimes get superceded fairly quickly.

Yes my original queen is dead unfortunately and now I have two ceased queen cells

pargyle · May 29, 2017

deemann1 said:
Yes my original queen is dead unfortunately and now I have two ceased queen cells

As they are both sealed you don't know what is in them ... so, as I said, best just let them get on with it. Bees usually know what they are doing - our interference is not alway necessary and often is undesirable. Leave them be for a couple of weeks and then a quick look to see if you have eggs/larvae. They are emergency queen cells so not likely to (indeed - very unlikely) to induce a swarm. If both queens emerge at the same time they will fight and there is a slim chance they could both end up damaged but the more likely eventuality is that the workers will protect one of the queens by keeping her in her cell until the other queen has mated and will then despatch the 'spare'.

This is natural bee behaviour .. it's what would happen in the wild so unless you want to introduce a bought in queen there's no mileage in destroying one or both of the queen cells.

If you have a Nuc spare you could put one of the frames with a queen cell on it into the Nuc with a frame or two of stores and bees and you have a second colony in the making .. which you could sell or keep as a back-up colony.

Depends what you future plans are ....