Queen Cells: Three Types of Queen Cells and What they Mean

When John started beekeeping, he was told to kill all queen cells. This lead to us loosing many hives needlessly. It also caused us to buy thousands of dollars of queens when we didn’t need to.

Worker bees make queen cells when they perceive a problem. Worker bees make queen cells to solve that problem.

Destroying queen cells without understanding what is wrong can destroy a hive.

The above two pictures show a typical example of two types of queen cells.

Swarm Cells

The cells on the left, near the bottom, are swarm cells. These are typically near the bottom. There will be brood around them, and right up to the queen cell.

When looking at these cells think, ‘did the worker bees look for the best larva?’ If you feel that the worker bees looked at all the larva and only chose the best, then they are most likely swarm cells.

Not all swarm cells are created equal. Some will be short and fat. Others will be long and plump.

Despite what some people claim is truth, I do harvest swarm cells and get excellent queens from them. That said, I do cull about 20% of the queens that hatch from swarm cells.

DO NOT DESTROY SWARM CELLS

The odds are the queen is already gone. The hive has already made it’s mind up to swarm. Nothing you can do will stop the swarm.

When we see a hive with a frame like this we will divide the hive into three nuc boxes. The person who taught us this said, with any luck you will keep one of the nucs and can rebuild.

Check carefully for the queen. If she is not there, then put one of the cells in each of the boxes.

Emergency Queen Cells

By the time you see emergency queen cells the queen is gone, and the brood is older. The worker bees are desperately trying to save the hive by growing out any queen.

I destroy all emergency cells. The queens will not be any good. There is probably not a virgin in the nuc, and the old queen is either gone, or dead.

Disease

The first thing I do is to check the bees carefully. Is there any sign of disease? If yes, then I destroy the hive and scorch the boxes, freeze the frames, and try again next spring.

Disease can also cause the bees to die and be laying on the bottom board.

Robbing

If there is no sign of disease, then look for any honey. If the honey is gone, or very low, then you may have a case of robbing. There is little chance you can stop robbing once it starts. If the hive is weak, then I will shake the bees out and harvest what is left of the honey.

Failed Requeening

The hive may have tried to requeen, and the virgin didn’t make it back from the mating flight.

Absconding or Fading

The bees may have left the hive, or died slowly. This is often attributed to mite overload.

If the hive has absconded there are probably bees robbing it out.

Another reason that we never thought of until we saw it. A farmer was spraying a fungicide. It was suppose to be safe for our bees. We were standing in the bee yard, and we noticed fewer and fewer bees were flying back to the hive.

Suddenly we realized that the bees could not fly through the ‘fog.’ It may have not poisoned them, but it was preventing them from returning. We never found the reason. But, all of our hives were set back about 1 month.

Shock

Cold shock happens a lot in the spring. A strong hive is building up, and you put a new box on top. The next time you return to the hive the bees are gone. They are probably piled on the bottom board.

To prevent this we follow Ian Steppler’s advice and put the new box on the bottom, under the brood box. Keep your boxes wrapped until mid March.

If it is after cold spells then there are a few things that might have caused the problem including pesticides, or other chemicals.

Supercedure Cells (Supersedure Cells)

These are the cells that you want to harvest. And, you should harvest them. Whether you take the queen cell and put it in a finishing nuc, or an incubator, you want to keep that cell.

Worker bees make queen cells when the queen is dead, failing, or the workers just do not want her anymore. I have taken a queen out of a hive and put her in a nuc, and she did just fine the rest of the year.

I will not remove a queen cell and requeen the hive immediately. The bees will want their own queen, and adding a mated queen can result in the workers killing the new queen.

I will harvest all the cells but one, there are usually 2 – 6. I will grow out the extra cells in an incubator. You can make a nuc, or a mating nuc, and grow the cells out in there.

Some people also put the cells in a sealed roller queen cage, and put several of them in a ‘finishing nuc’ or ‘finishing hive.’ This lets them all hatch. You can take a look at the queen and see if you want to dedicate a mating nuc to her. If she is small, deformed, or I just do not like her, I will pinch her.

When your queens are mated, it is time to inspect the main hive. If that queen has survived and is laying eggs (about 10 – 14 days) then all is good. If not, you can add one of the extra queens that has started to lay eggs into the hive.

You have successfully prevented yourself from loosing that hive. Also, you may have a few mating nucs with queens. You can requeen a hive with a weak queen. You can make a new hive. You can trade the extra queens with friends.

Do not kill this kind of cell as it indicates. It means that your hive is rejecting their queen and nothing you can do will stop it.

Queen Cell Cups

First you might notice cell cups in a frame, usually at the bottom. They do not necessarily mean anything unless there is an egg or larva in it.

If you see a queen cup with nothing in it, destroy the cup. Check each of the frames carefully to make sure there is no other queen cells. When done, checking a frame, check it again. It is amazing how easily we can miss a queen cell.

A. Queen Cup

B. Drone Cell/Drone Brood

C. Poor Quality Queen Cell

D. Good Quality Queen Cells

Also, notice the darkness at the end of these cells? That suggest the queen is almost mature.

Sometimes you may see cells that have holes in them. This can mean the worker bees opened up the cell. Do not panic. They can close it up again. There is some suggestions that the workers were cleaning out the cell, maybe of mites.

Drone Brood

I have fielded many questions, especially in FaceBook, asking to identify a queen cell that turns out to be drone brood.

Yes, drone brood can stick up above the worker brood. It can be on the edges of the comb. You may find a small clump of it. But, it is different from queen cells in the fact that it is only a ‘bubble’ of wax at the end of the cell.

Drone brood will never lay ‘flat’ along the comb, the way a queen cell does, and a queen cell will never be ‘in’ the comb, and just capped, the way drone brood is.

VSH Queen

This frame is a good example of a frame you can find in a hive with a VSH (Varroa Sensitive Hygiene) behavior.

The empty cells are places where the worker bees have removed varroa infected larva.

Notice the cells are flat, and wrinkled. This means that the worker cells are close to emerging.

The capped cells are surrounded by older larva, but no young larva or eggs.

There are 2 queen cups. Neither had a larva in it.

I removed the queen cups. I took this picture because this was one of my strongest 2024 VSH queens.

It is important to note that not all offspring from a VSH Queen will create worker bees with the same hygenic behaviors.

Testing For VHS Behavior

How I test the next generation is by putting a little powdered sugar on some of the nurse bees. In some hives the bees go crazy to get it off.

Then, I poke holes in larva and see if the nurse bees remove the larva.

The third test is to set the hive up to make drone brood, then open it. If there is almost no mites on larva (or in the bottom of the cells), then I consider the new queen VSH.

If I do not get more than 80% offspring as VSH, then I will not graft from that queen anymore. She will go out into the production bee yards.

The typical way to test for VSH behavior is to freeze the cells, but we do not have dry ice, so we use the simpler method of using a pin to kill the larva.

When we kill the larva, we want to see about 90% of the dead larva gone in two hours.

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