Cutting cells is not a plan

Destroying started queen cells looks like a decisive fix, but it buys far less than it looks like.

Cutting every visible cell removes the workers' immediate means of swarming, but it does nothing to the four pressures, congestion, backfilling, nurse surplus, and queen age, that made the colony start building cells in the first place.

Left in that state, a colony that has already decided to swarm typically starts new cells within days and can be right back at capped cells inside a week, on the same clock as before.

Cutting also fails the moment you miss even one, tucked in an unturned corner of a frame, since a single missed cell is enough to swarm on schedule. And once the cells are capped the colony has committed: cutting them then changes nothing about the day it leaves.

Treat cutting cells as a stall, not a solution.