What is a queen cell?

The queen bee is the “mother” of all the bees in her colony.   Each honey bee colony will be ruled by only one queen at a time.  She begins her life as a tiny larva, selected by worker bees and fed a special diet of exclusively royal jelly, which allows her to grow into an adult queen bee. 
 
Worker bees take charge in creating a new queen whenever one is needed in a colony.  Space constrictions, poor egg laying performance associated with the queen’s age, or perhaps the unexpected death of a queen will trigger worker bees to get right at work. 
 
Queens are raised in special cells, fittingly called queen cells, which resemble the shape and texture of a peanut and are constructed by the worker bees.   The old queen lays an egg in the queen cell while it is in the early stages of construction.  The worker bees then continue building the remainder of the queen cell around the egg.  In just three days, the egg will hatch into a larva.  After eight days, the cell that houses the queen larva will be fully encapsulated in beeswax by the worker bees.   Once encapsulated, the queen transforms into a pupa.  After 16 days, she is ready to emerge as the queen bee of the colony.    
 
She will fly only once in her lifetime and this flight event is referred to as her “maiden flight”.  The purpose of the maiden flight is to mate with several drones before returning to her colony for the remainder of her life.  Thereafter, the queen’s only job is to lay eggs…sometimes more than 1,500 eggs each day!
 
It is typical for a colony of bees to construct a few queen cells at one time, in order to better their odds that one queen will survive her maiden flight, mate, then return to the colony.  In the photo above, the worker bees have created three queen cells side-by-side, and only one of these queens will emerge victorious.
 
The first queen to emerge from her queen cell will immediately begin searching for other queen cells. She makes her best effort to kill all the other queens, while they are still encapsulated inside their cells, by stinging them through the wall of the cell from the outside.  Queen bees do not have a barbed stinger, so she can user her stinger repeatedly, without the threat of dying.