Recognizing the Differences between Drone Cells and Queen Cells

All year, our customer service, beekeeping, and education team members spend part of each day answering calls and emails from beekeepers. We have such a great time helping people understand what their bees are up to, and what they as beekeepers should be doing to help their colonies. A common source of confusion is whether a new beekeeper is looking at a batch of queen cells or a batch of drone cells near the bottom of one of their frames. The conversation goes something like this: 

New Beekeeper: "Something's wrong with my colony! I just installed my new bees and they're already getting ready to swarm. They've made a whole batch of capped queen cells at the bottom of the frame and I don't know what to do!"

Us: "Oh no! I'm so sorry to hear that! Let's talk about what you can do, and how you can manage this situation…"

[ONE HOUR LATER]

New Beekeeper: "Thanks so much. I'm just confused about one thing. You mentioned the queen cells hanging down, but they're mostly just sticking out to the sides..."

Us: "Wait a second! Are these cells pointing down towards the ground, or are they pointing out to the side of the frame?"

New Beekeeper: "They're parallel to the ground, just like the rest of the cells. Why?"

Once again, an eager beekeeper on the lookout for queen cells has misidentified their first batch of drones as a crop of new queens! 

We asked our Head Beekeeper, Anne Frey, to snap a few photos of queen cells and drone cells, to help us illustrate the difference. 

A queen cell on the left (circled in blue) hangs down from the bottom edge of the frame, while a cluster of drone cells (circled in red) on the right also extends below the frame’s bottom bar. Note the orientation, with the queen cell parallel to the surface of the comb while the drone cells are in line with the worker cells and parallel to the ground.

Why are queen cells usually down at the bottom of a frame?

When a bee colony builds a home in nature, away from beekeepers, the most common nest location is inside a hollow tree. In that tree cavity, the bees build long lobes of wax comb, starting at the ceiling and extending downwards. When the colony is ready to swarm and bud off a new colony, they construct queen cells at the bottom of their hanging combs. In the same way, when bees swarm in a hive they usually build swarm cells at the bottoms of their frames. The extra space there lets them build the queen cell so that it hangs out and downwards into the space between the upper frames and the lower frames. (Or between the frames and the bottom board, if the cells are built in the bottom set of frames.) Once a queen has emerged from the cell it’s even easier to identify, because young queens chew around the edge of their cell until they can swing open the little round “door” made of wax. 

Two hanging queen cells extend off the bottom edge of a frame and hang downwards. A queen has already emerged from the bottom cell.

Queen cells hang down, and young queens grow up hanging vertically because they wouldn't easily fit into the smaller worker cells that make up most of the comb. Just the abdomen of a queen has to be able to stretch down into cell after cell when she starts laying eggs. If a queen was raised in a worker cell, how could she fit her whole growing head, thorax, and long abdomen into such a short cell?! (The queen’s abdomen does actually grow longer after she emerges from her cell and mates, but she still needs more space to grow up than the typical stubby worker bee does.) These extra-long cells need plenty of space to stretch out, and that space is easy to find at the bottoms of frames. 

Why is drone brood often down there too?

Drone bees are larger than workers, and therefore have to be raised in larger cells. Since most beekeepers provide wax or plastic foundation to guide the comb-building of their bees, and since most foundation is worker-sized, the majority of the comb bees make will be worker-sized cells. Drone comb is sometimes squeezed in at the edges and bottom of the frame, where the bees building the bottom edge start to ignore the foundation and build larger drone cells instead. Sometimes bees will follow the worker-sized foundation all the way down to the bottom of the frame, but will squeeze a few rows of drones into the space between the bottom of the frames in one box and the tops of the frames in the box beneath it. Drone comb like this is often torn apart when frames or boxes are moved by the beekeeper, which can lead to confusing remnants of drone comb like those pictured below:

The layer of capped drone comb above this frame's top bar has been torn off of the bottom of the frame above it. A few open queen cells can also be seen beneath the drone comb on this frame.

However, frames with drone-sized foundation can be purchased, and are often used as a part of varroa mite management. When a colony already has ample drone comb, they often spend less time trying to sneak a few drone cells into the edges or bottoms of their other frames. The domed caps of drone cells sometimes alarm new beekeepers, but they are perfectly normal whether they're on a special drone frame, interspersed among the worker-sized cells on a frame, or attached to the bottoms of the frames.

On the left (circled in red), scattered capped drone brood in domed cells. Near the right edge (circled in blue), a capped queen cell, hanging downwards even though it was constructed in the middle of the frame and not down at the bottom. The orientation of the cells is often the clearest indicator of the type of bee inside.

New beekeepers can be forgiven for the occasional mix-up. After all, both drones and queens are larger than worker bees, and so they have to grow up in plus-sized cells. The drones are the colony’s male reproductive bees, while the queens are the female reproductive bees. The colony makes both drones and queens to spread their genes, and colonies usually decide to produce these reproductive bees at similar times of the year. An experienced beekeeper can usually tell the difference easily, by examining the location, orientation, size, and shape of the cells. 

Except…

Nothing in beekeeping is quite that simple. It's possible that a drone cell will slope slightly downward, and it’s also possible that a queen cell won't be hanging down exactly parallel to the comb surface. Therefore, there's a possibility that you’ll occasionally find a cell that could be a queen, or could be a drone, and you're just not sure. 

In the photo below, there are both drone cells and queen cells. Can you tell which is which?

Drone cells and queen cells are mixed together at the bottom of this frame and show some variation in angles that make it slightly harder to tell which cell is which.

How should you deal with a mystery cell that could contain either a drone or a young queen? Well, unless the colony is queenless, and this is the only maybe-queen-cell you can find, it might be easiest if you just cut open the cell and sacrifice the bee inside. Whether it was a developing queen or just a young drone, the colony can make others to replace them, and you’ll rest easier without having any mystery cells in the bottom of your frames. 

We're always happy to answer your beekeeping questions, but hopefully, this article will reduce the number of questions we get each spring from beekeepers that have mistaken drone cells for queen cells!