"Finding cells or leaving it up to the bees can cause inferior queens if the bees select older larva to make into queens."
apis, do you really think this happens? that bees select older larvae? i have read so much conflicting info on this however the majority of material says bees are 'smarter' than this and do 'know' the age of the egg/larvae. (feeding, capping, etc.) for example, in jay smith's earlier writing of "Queen Rearing Simplified" or another article "A Plea for Better Bees and Queens" he said essentially the bees would choose older larvae and, in his later writing "Better Queens", he said this was a 'fallacy' and that the bees "do the very best that can be done under existing circumstances".
i would suspect that this might be true, if we have given queenless bees eggs and larvae, the bees only have what we give them to raise a queen. in a situation of not knowing hives are queenless, this also might be true given what the failing or former queen left behind, but i also think that bees don't and won't raise a queen given larvae too old of an age.
not questioning you apis, just asking. i am not fond of emergency queens, walkaway splits, and sometimes not fond of giving queenless bees frames of eggs and larvae to raise their own queens, it's a crap shoot, and i don't like to wait. i do like to use swarm cells, these queens are usually well fed. i realize there are many variables, but i do think the bees know to choose the right age larvae, and the best queens are well fed queens.
sorry yankee, didn't mean to sidetrack your thread, just apis post brings up a good point on this subject. you choosing the larvae that you are grafting, being fed the royal jelly, and the bees accepting them or rejecting them.
