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All worker larvae are feeded with queen jelly during first 3 days. So they can continue queen rearing from 3 days old larva. In emergency cases nursers have not time to fill the cell enough with jelly and food will be short for oldest larvae.
What I think, bees start to widden very soon some worker cells and I can find larger cells next day. They may start new cells many days later.
In my queen rearing book the author says that nurser hive should be 3 days without brood. So they will have enough queen jelly to feed given larvae.
As you see, they feed normal worker cells too with royal jelly.
In emergency case it takes 10 days when queens start to emerge. They start to feed quite big larvae and cap them soon.
After capping queen larva continues eating, but if the food is finish, she will be small size.
When I graft smallest larvae to queen cells in Sunday, they start to emerge in Thursday evening. It is 12 days.
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It has been studied that if you change the first larvae from queen cells so larva has more food. The result has been that queens are not bigger
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