© 2026 Casey Spitnale
Chapter 6
What Came First
The Bee or the Queen?
“When a queen dies, or goes with a colony or swarm, she leaves behind her some princesses in their cells.”
Chapter 6 lines up two systems that look chaotic from the outside but were never improvising. When half of Casey's strongest hive swarmed on a Tuesday morning, he assumed disaster, until he found queen cells already built and waiting: planned succession the workers had prepared while the old queen was still laying. The colony wasn't scrambling to replace her. It had already decided. The historical anchor works the same way. In 1841, John Tyler settled a constitutional question nobody had tested yet: does the vice president become president, or just fill in? He took the oath and governed as president, full stop, over his own cabinet's objections. That precedent held through every succession after it, and when Lincoln was shot in 1865, Andrew Johnson was sworn in within hours with no debate at all. The plan had already been built. Nobody in that hotel parlor was inventing it on the spot. Casey's point isn't that the question in the chapter's title, what came first, doesn't matter. It's that watching a colony execute a plan it never asked his opinion on taught him the difference between keeping bees and what he calls being a "beedirector," someone who assumes every good outcome needs his hand on it. The queen cell was already built. The precedent was already set. Genesis 1:1 is where Casey lands on why: a Creator who plants tomorrow's answer inside today's preparation doesn't need anyone standing over the hive directing traffic.
Bee Science
- Queen cell emergence
- a worker's cell cap is fully chewed away when she emerges; a queen instead cuts a clean, precise circular opening near the cell tip that can swing open on a hinge or reseal behind her
- Queen-on-queen sororicide
- the first virgin queen to emerge doesn't wait to see who else is coming — she goes cell to cell hunting her still-sealed rivals, chewing a ragged hole in the side of each one and stinging the occupant
- Time from swarm departure to new queen
- about a week passes between a swarm's departure and the first new queen's emergence
- Three reasons a colony raises a queen
- emergency cells (queen lost without warning; workers rebuild cells holding larvae no more than three days old so they hang down the face of the comb), swarm cells (along the bottom edges of the frames, as in the chapter), and supersedure (a worn-out queen's scent fades; the replacement is raised on the face of the comb while the old queen is still there). 'The old queen and her new daughter may both be present in the hive for some time following supersedure,' and supersedure queens are usually better than emergency queens because they get more royal jelly while growing
- Cell size and cell wax shape a queen
- in 2011, Jiangxi Agricultural University researchers showed cell size alone changes how a larva develops even on the same food; in 2026 a team writing in Nature reported that queen-cell wax is mechanically and chemically different from worker-cell wax, that the workers' own physiology changes to make it, and that those properties are required for a queen to develop normally
- Honeybees and zero
- in 2018, honeybees trained to pick the card with fewer shapes chose a blank card over a card with one shape, placing zero below one; zero against six was easier for them than zero against one, the pattern people show. A 2021 team found bees could have used other cues on the cards and that a simple computer model could pass without counting ('a sense of magnitude may be more primitive and basic than a sense of number'); a 2026 reanalysis by the original team and new colleagues said the results pointed to real number sense after all. Still argued in the journals
- Caste-determination complexity
- the genetic differences that produce a queen versus a worker involve hundreds of coordinated gene expressions, and even the most primitive social bees known already show real division of labor
Cited research (1)
- Thomas D. Seeley, Honeybee Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2010), pp. 42-44: Source for the first-virgin-queen sororicide behavior (chewing holes in rival cells, stinging the occupants) and the roughly one-week gap between swarm departure and the new queen's emergence; the circular/hinged-cap detail on how a queen opens her own cell is general apicultural knowledge, not sourced to Seeley specifically
Scripture
Anchor: Romans 1:20
Also touches
Civil War Recordcivil war
The Tyler Precedent (1841) and Andrew Johnson's succession after Lincoln's assassination (1865)
- William Henry Harrison died April 4, 1841, one month into his term — the shortest presidential tenure in U.S. history; Vice President John Tyler resolved the Constitution's ambiguous succession language by assertion, taking the oath and governing as president in full rather than 'acting president'
- Tyler's move was politically contested at the time — Daniel Webster and the rest of Harrison's cabinet resisted it — but it held and was never re-litigated by any subsequent vice-presidential succession
- Lincoln was shot at Ford's Theatre on April 14, 1865 and died at 7:22 a.m. the next morning; Vice President Andrew Johnson was sworn in by Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase later that same morning, in a private parlor at the Kirkwood House hotel in Washington, with no debate about whether he was fully president
- By 1865, the succession question the Tyler Precedent had settled had already gone unquestioned through every prior vice-presidential succession
- The cost of Tyler's answer: Secretary of State Daniel Webster proposed that Harrison's cabinet govern collectively with Tyler as one vote among equals; Tyler refused it and moved into the White House (source: manuscript ch.6; notes/research/tyler-precedent-johnson-succession-1841-1865.md). Johnson took the oath from Chief Justice Chase between ten and eleven that morning, in a private parlor at the Kirkwood House
- The 20th Massachusetts and a line of succession that was used: in January 1863 Henry Livermore Abbott listed for his mother who would command if the wounded colonel could not return ('Macy would be col., Hallowell lt. col., and Holmes would be the only one between me and a majority'; that Holmes was Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.). That April former major Paul Revere, grandson of the midnight rider, came back from a staff post and got the colonelcy over Macy; Abbott wrote in May 'I can't meet Revere without feeling sorer & sorer,' and after the June march north, 'All our pique against Revere too had long ceased.' At Gettysburg Revere was hit by a shell fragment on July 2 and died three days later, Macy lost a hand, three of thirteen officers were left, and command came down to Abbott, a captain of twenty-one, who wrote three days later 'However I think we can run the machine.' Two years earlier, in May 1861, Abbott had written his father 'My tastes are not warlike like Ned and Fletcher's, but literary & domestic' (his brothers), and the chapter reads him as the emergency queen: a young larva already in the comb when the colony needed one. Abbott died commanding the regiment in the Wilderness the following May (Abbott, Fallen Leaves, ed. Robert Garth Scott, 1991; source: manuscript ch.6; notes/research/fallen-leaves-abbott-letters.md)
Primary sources (7)
- Wikipedia, "Tyler Precedent"
- Washington Post, "The Tyler Precedent: How John Tyler became president after William Henry Harrison in 1841"
- National Constitution Center, "A controversial President who established presidential succession"
- Library of Congress, "Andrew Johnson taking the oath of office in the small parlor of the Kirkwood House [Hotel]"
- U.S. Senate, "The Swearing In of Andrew Johnson"
- Henry Livermore Abbott, Fallen Leaves, ed. Robert Garth Scott (1991)
- Andrew Pettigrew, The Handy Book of Bees (1875), for the chapter's Woodbury retraction line ('Mr Woodbury, and all of his way of thinking on this question, are right, and we were wrong'; see notes/research/handy-book-of-bees.md)
verified
From the Book
I was having a complete hot mess moment when half my strongest colony swarmed on a Tuesday morning. One day they were humming along perfectly. The next, half the bees were gone with the old queen. The hive looked decimated. I'll be honest, I was frantic, and a little embarrassed about it too. Swarming is completely natural. Bees have been doing it since long before anyone kept them in a box. But a beekeeper who's staying on top of things can usually see it coming. You can split the hive yourself or give the bees more room before they feel crowded. There are a handful of other ways to head it off too. I hadn't done any of that. My first instinct was to call Marc. He usually had a queen or two to sell. I was sure this colony was doomed unless I stepped in. Then I stopped long enough to look at what the bees had left behind. There, on the bottom of several frames, were queen cells the workers had prepared before the swarm departed. Not one or two, but half a dozen. These weren't emergency cells thrown together in panic. They were planned succession, prepared while the old queen was still laying eggs and ruling the hive. The bees had seen this coming and gotten ready for it, while I'd been completely clueless.
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