open queen cell in an apidea on the face of the comb

[Jon]

This is not what you want to find in an apidea.
In this case I found a queen with an orange band on the abdomen which had just started to lay.

Photo (http://www.native-queen-bees.com/queen-cell-in-an-apidea/)

[busybeephilip]

Can happen if the original laying queen with the desired genetics has gone missing without your knowledge.

The queen you found suggests that the original queen with the desired Amm genetics (if thats what it is) had mated with some yellow boyo from down the road which is perhaps the reason why there are some workers with yellow bands as well. No loss as the original queen was not mated with the correct drones but it emphasizes that one should always wait for brood to hatch before saying that the mating is as pure as you might think it is.

[Jon]

This was an apidea which had already produced a mated queen.
A queen emerged from the second introduced cell but they must have dispatched her and made one of their own.
The first queen which mated from this apidea must have mated with at least one yellow drone.
You can see a few yellow banded workers on the comb but I also used a yellow swarm to fill apideas at the start of the season so they could be the remnant from that.

There is a fluffy newly emerged bee on the side bar which is dark.
I have seen very few with yellow banding this year so that was just unfortunate.
Some people think that yellow bees are more likely to reject black queens and I think there may be some truth in that.
I filled about a dozen apideas with those yellow bees in June and a lot of the queens went missing out of that batch. Could be just coincidence but I have my suspicions that it could be a pheromone thing.

[busybeephilip]

Yes Jon, agreed that was more or less what I said had happened regarding the queen

I think you are probably correct about the pheromone thing. I have observed this when trying to introduce queens of different race, in fact trying to requeen a vicious carnolian mongrel stock with one of your native queens proved to be exceedingly difficult, as the bees would ball the released queen after 10 mins or so of freedom for no obvious reason. They eventually accepted the traumatized queen but I think I'll have to replace her as she did get an injury but at least the bees will be more acceptable to the same race of queen second time around.

[Jon]

I think introducing the queen to a nuc then requeening by combining the nuc with the queenless stock after a couple of weeks is probably the safest way.

Any colony with a new queen can start to ball it if it is disturbed.
Bees live in the dark and the light entering when a colony is opened is likely a powerful trigger that there is an intruder around.
I had a colony a few years ago which always balled the queen when it was opened.
In this case I think it was a protective thing as they balled her dozens of times and never harmed her.
The same thing happened with some of her daughters as well so that was likely a genetic/pheromone characteristic as well.