New Virgin Queen

[Cfarmboy83]

First I like to say Hello all, I'm a new member to the forum. I've been keeping bees a couple of years now and I usually just order a new queen about every two years for my three hives. This year I started some nucs and just had several queens hatch out. I was wandering how long will it take a virgin queens to mate and start laying eggs. Any help is appreciated.

[Finsky]

Queen makes mating flight 7 days old. It starts to lay eggs about as 10 days old if weather has been good for mating.

[Cfarmboy83]

Thank you for the information Finsky.

[Michael Bush]

The numbers they give you in the books and clases are useful for something, but they seem to leave a few gaps in the information.  From the time the egg is layed until the cell is capped is eight days.  But from the time you make them queenless it's only four or five days.  That's because they start with a young larvae and not an egg.  From the time the egg is layed until I would expect to see eggs is 28 days (give or take a few days).  So from the time you made them queenless that's 24 days.  From the time she emerges until you see eggs averages about 10 to 12 days.

[Cfarmboy83]

Hey guys, just thought I let you know how it went. I went outside yesterday and check the nucs. I have a good success rate for a first timer. I had 2 out of 3 queens laying eggs. The third queen is MIA so that nuc was a perfect canidate for my ALL_American queen I ordered back in march. Thanks again for the info. It saved me alot of time and reading.