Larvae to queen?

[GTX188]

Good Afternoon,
I have a hive that I think has been queenless for a while now. I ordered a new queen and installed last week.. today I inspected, she was out of the cage but no where to be seen, and also no eggs/larvae were seen either. I took a frame of brood from a good hive and placed it in this hive. My question is the frame I placed in has larvae of various sizes... but no real "eggs". My hope is if something happened to the queen they would raise another. Do they need eggs to start raising a queen or would larvae work as well??? Thanks for any info!!

[bassman1977]

It'll be done from larvae anyway but real young.  The best time to have a queen cell done is 48 hours or less after the egg is layed.  Once the larvae no longer looks like a banana in the cell, it's old, but a queen could still be reared from it.  It might not be a very good queen if raised from an old larvae though.

[TwT]

when I do one like this I like to have young larva and eggs on the frame, that kinda tells me some larva is not to old to make a queen. 

[jdpro5010]

Adding a frame of eggs/larvae is always good insurance.  I, though, would not panic  yet with the purchased queen.  Just give her a week or two to start laying.  Sometimes it just takes a little time.

[leechmann]

Can you tell me where you ordered your new queen from?

[Hethen57]

My package queens got laying within a day or so, but when I queened a split with a storebought queen, it took about 9 days until any eggs were visible.  Up to that point, most all of the capped brood had hatched and there were a bunch of empty cells waiting for eggs.  Bee patient.