Honey guide
When Two Queens Hatch — What Happens in the Hive
When two queen cells hatch in the same hive, the first virgin queen hunts and kills rivals. Here's exactly how the process unfolds in a British colony.
By Honey Honey Honey · Published 3 June 2026
What triggers a hive to raise multiple queen cells at once?
A colony raises multiple queen cells in two main circumstances: swarming and supersedure. In both cases, the existing queen's pheromone distribution has fallen short of what the colony requires.
During swarming, the colony has grown so large that the old queen's mandibular pheromone — the primary signal of her presence — no longer reaches every worker. When peripheral bees stop receiving this signal regularly, they begin drawing out queen cells along the lower edges of brood frames. A colony preparing to swarm typically builds between 10 and 20 cells simultaneously, which serves as a buffer: not all cells will produce a viable queen.
Supersedure is different. Here the colony detects that the current queen is failing — her egg-laying rate has dropped, she has a physical injury, or disease has reduced her effectiveness. Workers raise one to three replacement cells, usually positioned mid-frame on the comb face rather than along the bottom edge. The existing queen may still be alive and laying when supersedure cells are capped.
In both cases, the colony does not aim for a single queen cell. Redundancy increases the probability that at least one queen will emerge, mate successfully, and return to the colony. Building ten or fifteen cells is cheap for the colony compared to the cost of becoming queenless.
There is a third, less common trigger: a beekeeper has accidentally killed or removed the queen during an inspection. Workers detect the absence of queen pheromone within hours and begin emergency queen cells from existing young larvae. These emergency cells are often built in the middle of a frame, wherever suitable larvae were available, and the resulting queens are sometimes less vigorous than those raised in planned swarm or supersedure cells.
Temperature, season, and forage conditions all influence the timing. In the UK, most swarm queen cells appear between late April and July, peaking during the main honey flow when colony populations are largest.
What happens when the first virgin queen emerges from her cell?
The first virgin queen to emerge has an immediate biological drive to locate and destroy her rivals. She navigates through the hive by scent, moving systematically between frames. When she detects an occupied queen cell — identified by the distinct pheromone a capped queen pupates with — she chews through the wax cap or bites a hole in the side of the cell.
She then inserts her curved sting into the cell and stings the occupant. Because her rivals are immobile pupae, the attack is entirely one-sided. The worker bees standing on adjacent cells generally move away and allow this to happen. After stinging, the virgin queen may continue to bite through the cell to confirm the kill before moving on to the next.
This behaviour is not aggression in the everyday sense — it is a highly specific, chemically triggered response to the pheromone of a rival queen. Remove the scent cue, and the behaviour stops. The virgin queen does not attack workers or drones.
The process takes minutes to hours depending on how many cells are distributed across the hive. In a large colony with 20 queen cells spread across multiple frames, the queen must move considerable distance. Workers may have already torn down some cells on their own by this point.
The surviving queen typically pipes loudly during and after this process — the tooting call that beekeepers recognise as a sign that a new queen is present. Any remaining capped queens answer from inside their cells with a lower quacking sound. The piping continues until no answers are heard, signalling the elimination is complete.
Beekeepers who open a hive and find destroyed queen cells with a hole in the side have evidence that a virgin queen already emerged and has been at work.
What if two queens hatch at exactly the same time?
When two virgin queens emerge simultaneously, or when the first queen cannot reach remaining cells because workers are clustering to protect them, the queens meet and fight directly.
The fight is brief and decisive. Two virgin queens circling each other will grapple, each attempting to curve her abdomen and sting the other in a vulnerable joint between body segments. A queen's sting is curved and smooth — unlike a worker bee's barbed sting — so she can sting repeatedly without dying. The fight typically ends within seconds to a few minutes, with one queen stinging the other fatally in the thorax or abdomen.
Workers form a tight ring around the fighting queens but do not usually intervene to separate them. Occasionally a worker will join the cluster around the losing queen in a behaviour called balling — surrounding her with so many bodies that she overheats and dies. This is not the same as rescuing the other queen; balling is typically a response to an alien or very weak queen rather than a fighting response.
The condition that produces simultaneous emergence is more common in small colonies or nucleus hives where queen cells are clustered tightly together and the first queen has little space to move before encountering another emerging queen.
In some cases, the colony is in a state called a cast — where a secondary swarm leaves with a virgin queen before the fights are resolved. This happens in large colonies where workers actively guard a subset of the queen cells from the emerging virgin. Cast swarms are smaller than primary swarms and are less desirable for beekeepers to catch because they contain no mated, proven queen.
Do workers protect any of the queens during this process?
Workers rarely intervene to save a queen during the rivalry process, but they do sometimes guard certain cells from being opened. When a colony is preparing a cast swarm, workers cluster over a selection of capped queen cells and physically prevent the first emerged queen from accessing them. This guarding behaviour appears coordinated and is thought to be driven by scout bees already committed to a particular nest site.
This protection is temporary and purposeful: the workers are not saving a specific queen because she is superior — they are preserving options for a secondary swarm cast. Once the swarm decision is resolved, protective clustering dissolves and the remaining fights proceed.
In supersedure situations, workers sometimes appear to act to slow the first queen's progress through the hive, giving the colony time to assess whether any additional queen is needed. Some colonies complete supersedure with both the old and new queen present for a short period — workers may temporarily tolerate both by physically separating them on different frames.
This mother-daughter coexistence is unusual and typically lasts days to a few weeks. It ends when one queen is killed, often the older one, and the colony normalises around the new, younger queen.
Workers do help a queen emerge from her cell by chewing the wax cap when the time is right — but this is not selective favouritism. Workers cap and uncap cells based on chemical signals from the developing queen inside, not a judgment about her quality.
The overall picture is a colony that facilitates queen replacement but does not control which individual wins. The contest outcome is determined by which queen emerges first and moves fastest, not by worker selection pressure.
What is the difference between a swarm queen cell and a supersedure cell?
Swarm queen cells and supersedure cells differ in position, quantity, and the colony's intent when building them. Recognising the difference matters practically for beekeepers deciding how to respond.
Swarm cells are built along the bottom edges and lower corners of brood frames. Workers prefer these locations because the cells hang freely from the comb, making it easier for the developing queen to form the correct head-down orientation before emergence. A colony building swarm cells typically produces 10–20 cells distributed across several frames. The existing queen is usually healthy and still laying at full rate when swarming preparations begin.
Supersedure cells are built in the middle of a comb face, wherever a suitable young larva was available when the workers decided to replace the queen. They are fewer in number — usually one to three — and appear more abruptly, sometimes within 24 hours of the colony detecting a failing queen. The existing queen may still be present and still laying when these cells are built; some colonies continue to use the old queen until the new one mates.
Emergency queen cells look like supersedure cells in their mid-frame placement but are built in response to a sudden queen loss rather than a planned replacement. Their quality depends on the age of the larva used: larvae under three days old produce good queens; older larvae result in queens with smaller ovaries and reduced laying capacity.
A useful rule for UK beekeepers: finding multiple cells along frame bottoms in May or June almost always means swarming preparations. Finding one or two cells mid-frame on a comb with poor brood patterns suggests supersedure. Finding mid-frame cells with no evidence of the old queen suggests emergency replacement.
How does the new queen establish dominance over the colony?
A newly mated queen establishes her position not through aggression toward workers but through pheromone production. Once she begins laying, her mandibular pheromone complex — a blend of fatty acids including 9-ODA — spreads through the colony via worker-to-worker contact. Workers groom the queen and then pass the chemical signal during trophallaxis (food sharing) with nestmates.
This chemical communication performs two functions. First, it suppresses ovary development in workers, ensuring only the queen reproduces. Second, it provides continuous confirmation of her presence: workers that receive regular queen pheromone contact are not triggered to build replacement cells.
Before mating, a virgin queen produces pheromones at much lower concentrations and her dominance over workers is weaker. This is why some colonies will begin emergency queen preparations even with a virgin already present — the signal is not yet strong enough to fully suppress the workers' replacement behaviour.
After a successful mating flight, the queen's pheromone profile changes measurably. Her laying begins typically 2–5 days after mating, and colony behaviour shifts within hours of the first eggs being laid. Workers cluster more attentively around the queen, brood-rearing behaviour intensifies, and the restlessness associated with a queenless or virgin-queen colony subsides.
A new queen in a UK hive during summer typically achieves full laying capacity within two to three weeks of mating. Her first brood emerges roughly 21 days after laying, and by six weeks after emergence she has a full complement of nurse bees, foragers, and builders working under her chemical direction. At this point, the colony is fully re-established under her control.
Can a beekeeper use multiple queen cells to split a hive?
A beekeeper can use surplus queen cells from a swarming colony to create artificial splits — nucleus colonies or full splits — each headed by one of the developing queens. This is a practical way to increase colony numbers without buying nucleus colonies.
The technique requires careful timing. Queen cells should be moved only when they are capped and at least a day old after capping — moving them before the cap fully sets risks damaging the developing queen inside. Each split needs one sealed cell, a frame of sealed brood, a frame of open brood, a frame of stores, and enough workers to cover all frames.
The critical rule: put only one queen cell per split. If two cells go into the same nucleus, the first to emerge will destroy the other, and the beekeeper gains no advantage from having moved the second cell.
Queen cells should be handled with minimal movement and kept vertical, with the cell cup pointing downward, exactly as it would hang on the comb. Inverting a capped cell can kill the pupa inside.
In the UK, splits made with swarm cells work best in May and June when flying weather is reliable and drones are plentiful for mating flights. A virgin queen needs multiple mating flights over several days, and prolonged rain or cold — common in British springs — can delay or prevent successful mating, leaving the nucleus with a drone-layer or queenless.
Experienced beekeepers sometimes cut capped cells from the comb and transport them in a matchbox-sized wooden cell protector packed with workers from the donor colony. This keeps the cell at temperature during transit and gives the emerging queen an immediate attendant workforce.
Why don't colonies always produce the strongest queen possible?
Colony queen-rearing does not optimise for the "strongest" individual by any measurable standard. The colony selects queen-rearing sites based on larval availability and comb position, not on genetics or larval quality beyond minimum thresholds.
All female larvae are genetically capable of becoming queens for the first three days of larval life. The difference between a worker and a queen is determined entirely by diet: larvae fed only royal jelly throughout their larval development become queens; larvae switched to worker jelly after day three develop as workers. When a colony decides to raise a queen, it identifies suitable young larvae and converts their cells to queen cups, maintaining the rich royal jelly diet throughout.
The colony does not compare multiple larvae and select the best. It uses whatever larvae are available in the right age window. This means queen quality varies: an emergency queen raised from a two-and-a-half-day-old larva will have smaller ovaries and may lay fewer eggs per day than a queen raised from a freshly hatched larva in planned supersedure conditions.
Natural selection acts on colonies over generations, not on individual queen choices. A colony with a poor queen may swarm with that queen and fail to establish elsewhere, removing her genetics from the local population over time.
For UK beekeepers interested in queen quality, this means that swarm cells — built under planned conditions from young larvae — tend to produce better queens than emergency cells built from older larvae. Dedicated queen-rearing methods, such as the Miller or Jenter systems, allow beekeepers to present young grafted larvae in ideal conditions, producing more consistent results than relying on the colony's own choices.
What does a newly hatched virgin queen look like compared to a mated queen?
A virgin queen is noticeably different in body shape from a laying mated queen, and understanding this difference helps beekeepers identify what stage of queen development their hive is at.
A virgin queen is slimmer and more active than her mated counterpart. Her abdomen is narrow — similar in width to a large worker — because her ovaries have not yet developed to full reproductive capacity. She moves faster across the comb than a laying queen, changing direction frequently and sometimes running. Workers do not form the characteristic retinue around her in the same way they do around a mated queen.
Her colouring depends on the strain: UK native black bees produce dark virgin queens; Italian or Buckfast-derived colonies produce lighter amber ones. Regardless of strain, she will appear less distinctly coloured than a fully mated laying queen because her abdomen lacks the swollen, glossy appearance that comes with developed ovaries and active laying.
After mating — which typically occurs 5–10 days after emergence, weather permitting — the queen's abdomen expands noticeably as her ovaries enlarge. She moves more slowly across the comb, workers begin grooming and feeding her regularly, and the retinue behaviour becomes obvious: six to eight workers facing her, antennae extended, clustered in a ring.
A mated queen's legs are often stained with propolis from constant contact with the comb. Her wings are sometimes slightly worn at the tips. These physical signs of age and use accumulate within weeks of her beginning to lay.
Beekeepers inspecting a hive and finding a slim, fast-moving queen with no retinue are looking at a virgin — they should note the date and return in two to three weeks to check for eggs, confirming successful mating.
Frequently asked questions
- Can two queens live peacefully in one hive?
- No. Worker bees produce a substance that suppresses excess queens, and any virgin queen will actively kill rivals. Two laying queens cohabiting is extremely rare and always temporary.
- What sound does a virgin queen make?
- Virgin queens produce a high-pitched piping sound called 'tooting'. Queens still inside cells answer with a lower 'quacking'. This acoustic exchange is thought to signal location before combat.
- How long does it take a queen to emerge from her cell?
- A queen takes 16 days from egg to emergence — three days as an egg, five as a larva, and eight days capped in the pupal stage. Workers chew the cap to help her exit.
- Do workers kill excess queens themselves?
- Workers sometimes ball a queen — surrounding and overheating her — but this is more common with foreign or failing queens. During normal emergence rivalry, workers usually step back and let queens fight.
- What is a virgin queen?
- A virgin queen is a newly emerged queen that has not yet mated. She is slimmer than a laying queen, more agile, and capable of stinging rival queens. She typically mates 5–10 days after emergence.
- How many queen cells does a swarm colony typically produce?
- A colony preparing to swarm commonly builds 10–20 queen cells, often clustered along the lower edges of frames. A supersedure event typically produces just one to three cells.
- Can a beekeeper hear the queen piping?
- Yes. Experienced beekeepers listening at the hive entrance or with an ear against the box can hear the tooting and quacking sounds in the days immediately after a swarm leaves.
- What happens if all queens are killed before mating?
- The colony becomes queenless. Without intervention, workers eventually start laying unfertilised eggs, producing only drones. The colony will die within a few weeks unless a new queen is introduced.