A queen cell looks like a peanut shell hanging from the comb. It’s rough-textured, elongated, and about an inch or more long, making it dramatically larger than the flat, uniform worker cells that cover most of a frame. Once you know what to look for, queen cells are impossible to miss during a hive inspection.
But not all queen cells mean the same thing. Their location on the frame, their stage of development, and their number all tell you something different about what your colony is doing. Here’s how to read them.
General Size, Shape, and Texture
A completed queen cell resembles a peanut in size, shape, texture, and color. The surface is bumpy and irregular, unlike the neat hexagonal pattern of worker comb. Queen cells hang vertically because developing queens are too large to fit into standard worker cells, which lie horizontal and parallel to the ground. These extra-long cells need room to stretch out, so the bees build them pointing downward with plenty of space beneath.
If you crack open a queen cell that’s still in development, you’ll find a white, worm-like larva floating in a pool of milky-white royal jelly. The royal jelly is the queen larva’s exclusive food source, and there’s far more of it than you’d find in a worker cell.
Queen Cups vs. Active Queen Cells
Before a full queen cell exists, bees often build queen cups: small, round, acorn-shaped wax structures that sit empty on the comb. These are essentially practice runs or placeholders. Many colonies keep a few queen cups around at all times without ever using them, so their presence alone isn’t cause for alarm.
A queen cup becomes an active queen cell when the bees place an egg or young larva inside and begin extending the walls downward. Once you see a cup with a larva surrounded by royal jelly, the colony has committed to raising a new queen. That’s the moment that matters for hive management.
Swarm Cells vs. Supersedure and Emergency Cells
Where a queen cell sits on the frame tells you why the bees are building it.
Swarm cells hang from the bottom edge or sides of the comb. These are planned well in advance. The colony is preparing to split, with the old queen leaving with a swarm and a new queen emerging to take over. Swarm cells often appear in groups, sometimes a dozen or more across several frames. Finding multiple peanut-shaped cells dangling from the bottom bars of your frames during spring is the classic sign that swarming is imminent.
Supersedure cells appear on the face of the comb, typically in the middle area of the frame. These indicate the colony is quietly replacing a failing or aging queen. You’ll usually see only one to three supersedure cells, far fewer than with swarming. When completed, they grow to the same peanut size as swarm cells.
Emergency queen cells also appear on the face of the comb, built directly from existing worker cells. If a queen dies suddenly, the bees select young worker larvae that are already in cells and reconstruct the wax around them into queen cells. Because they’re converted from worker comb rather than built from scratch on the bottom edge, emergency cells look slightly different at their base. They emerge from a patch of normal worker brood rather than hanging freely from the frame’s edge. This method is faster than building entirely new cells from the bottom of the frame.
How to Tell What Stage a Cell Is In
Queen cells go through visible changes over their 16 to 17 day development period from egg to adult queen. Learning to read these stages helps you estimate your timeline.
An open (uncapped) cell means the larva is still being fed. You can look inside and see the white larva curled in royal jelly. The cell walls are extended but the top remains open. At this stage, the cell looks like a small, downward-pointing cup with rough wax edges.
A capped cell means the larva has been sealed inside to pupate. The cell is capped around day 8 after the egg was laid, giving you roughly 8 to 9 more days before the new queen emerges. A capped queen cell is fully formed: the complete peanut shape, sealed at the bottom with a rounded wax cap.
An emerged cell is easy to spot because the new queen chews a circular opening around the tip of the cell, swinging the end open like a little round door on a hinge. If you see a peanut-shaped cell with a clean, circular hole at the bottom, a queen has already hatched from it. By contrast, a cell with a ragged, torn-open hole on the side was likely destroyed by a rival queen or by bees clearing out the cell.
Don’t Confuse Queen Cells With Drone Cells
New beekeepers sometimes mistake drone brood for queen cells. Drone cells are larger than worker cells and have distinctive domed caps that bulge outward, which can look alarming if you’re not expecting them. But the differences are straightforward.
Drone cells sit in clusters, often at the edges or bottom of a frame, and they face outward from the comb the same direction as worker cells, parallel to the ground. Their caps have a pebbly, cobblestone-like texture. There may be hundreds grouped together. Queen cells, by comparison, hang vertically downward, perpendicular to the comb face, and appear individually or in small groups rather than in large uniform patches. Worker cells, for reference, are the smallest of the three and have flat caps.
What to Do When You Find Queen Cells
Your response depends entirely on the type of cell and its stage.
Supersedure and emergency cells generally don’t require intervention. The colony is solving its own queenlessness problem, and the best approach is to leave them alone and let the bees work. The one exception is if the colony lost its queen more than 4 to 5 days after she last laid eggs. Without very young larvae to work with, the bees can’t raise a viable queen, and you’ll need to provide a frame of fresh eggs or young brood from another hive.
Swarm cells require active management if you want to keep your colony intact. Simply destroying queen cells does not prevent swarming. Colonies that have committed to swarming will rebuild cells or swarm anyway. The standard approach is an artificial swarm: splitting the colony in a controlled way that satisfies the bees’ impulse to divide without losing half your workforce into the trees.
If you find sealed swarm cells and the colony hasn’t yet swarmed, you still have time to perform an artificial swarm. If the prime swarm has already left and you want to prevent additional smaller “cast” swarms, select one healthy unsealed queen cell where you can see a good larva, then destroy every other queen cell in the hive, both sealed and unsealed. Check back 3 to 4 days later to make sure the bees haven’t started new cells, which could trigger another swarm.