Laying Worker
- What is it?
- Workers laying eggs instead of a queen.
- Bit of background.
- Fertilised eggs develop into females
- Unfertilised eggs develop into males.
- Queens are female
- Workers are female
- Drones are male
- Why is it a problem
- Workers are unfertilised females.
- They can only lay unfertilised eggs
- Unfertilised eggs develop into drones
- A hive with only drones is doomed.
- Why does it happen?
- A queenless hive or a weak queen
- Did you remove all the queen cells without checking for a queen?
- All workers have an undeveloped ability to lay eggs.
- The development of workers ovaries is prevented by:
- Pheromones given off by the queen
- Pheromones given off by open brood.
- No queen means no ovary suppressing pheromones.
- How do you spot it?
- Many cells with multiple eggs
- May be a new queen who is learning.
- Do not draw any conclusions till next inspection.
- Eggs laid on side of cell not at the bottom.
- Workers have a shorter abdomen so cannot get eggs to base of cell.
- Eggs laid on top of pollen stores
- Eggs laid in cells containing a developing larva
- More than one larva in a cell.
- Patchy brood pattern.
- Since there is no coordinator workers lay where they want.
- Random pattern of drone brood in worker cells.
- In a queen right hive drone brood is all together
- Drone brood is usually at the bottom of the frame
- How do you cure it?
- Introduce a new queen.
- Likely to fail as the colony does not think it is queenless.
- She will probably be killed.
- Insert a frame of open brood every 6 days for 3 weeks
- Open brood emits a pheromone to suppress workers from laying.
- But it weakens colonies you remove brood from.
- It may not work.
- Shake out all bees on far side of apiary. - method 1.
- Move hive to far side of apiary and shake out all the bees.
- Reassemble hive in orginal position.
- Only workers who are not laying fly back to hive.
- Destroy any "queen cells" - they are "king cells"
- Remove any brood
- Insert a frame of open brood.
- This may not work - some laying workers may return to the hive.
- Intoduce a new queen
- Feed the colony immediately
- Cross your fingers and wait!
- This may not work - some laying workers may return to the hive.
- Shake out all bees on far side of apiary - method 2.
- Move hive to far side of apiary and shake out all the bees.
- Only workers who are not laying can fly.
- Remove the empty hive from the apiary.
- Ejected bees will join the nearest strong colony.
- Unite the colony with a strong colony.
- It must be a strong colony to prevent workers killing the queen.
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