queen quest

[md]

greetings, I have a question about queen cells in a queenless hive. This spring I bought 2 packages of bees and one of the queens was a real winner.  The hive  had drawn comb and that queen went to work and had the hive burgeoning in  short order.  Oops... they ended up casting several swarms and I was lucky enough to catch two and combine them into one new hive. This new hive has been doing great and I'm guessing I have that original terrific queen.  So the old hive ended up queenless and the new hive is prolific as all heck. I had the big idea to steal the queen from the new hive and send her back to the original hive and let the new hive make a new queen. One week later and the old hive is back in business with a laying queen.  So all of that for this question.... The new hive has many - I'd guess around 10 or more capped queen cells. This new queenless hive won't swarm will it? I wasn't expecting so many emergency cells to be built.  They are not on the bottom like swarm cells - they are on the face (in the middle) of several of the frames.

[randydrivesabus]

what should happen is that the first queen to emerge will dispatch the others. if you wanted to you could carefully remove some of those queen cells and put them into other nucs.

[derrick1p1]

If it were spring/early summer, I'd make some nucs and give some of the extra queen cells.  But probably not a good idea this late in the year.  I'd leave them be, a newly emerged queen will detroy the remaining cells, or they will fight it out.