As I wrote about in this post, the development of a queen is very precise: This photo was taken on day 4 with the cell expected to be fully capped on day 7. The queen will emerge from her cell on days 15-17 (April 24-26, 2014) and the first to emerge will rip open the other queen cell and sting the queen to death.
I've read that worker bees will sometimes not allow a queen to dispose of all her potential rivals right away; they bar her from some of the cells. She will then begin to pipe (a tooting sound) and may continue to do so day and night, perhaps for a week or more with the piping rising in intensity and volume which may heard more than 10 feet from the hive.
Meanwhile the maturing queen bees still in cells try to get out, each in turn but the worker bees hold them back... As fast as one of them opens the cap of her cell the workers push it back in place and glue it shut. These imprisoned queens also start to pipe, but in a different pattern and at a lower tone than the free queen. The workers let out some of these queens, but only one at a time. The reigning queen and the newly released rival then battle until one is killed. A series of fights between the survivor and the new rivals goes on until only one queen is left. This survivor, still a virgin, then flies away from the hive to mate with several drones before she returns to begin laying eggs.
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