Can you identify a drone laying worker?

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Loolabelle1

New Bee
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Location
Berkshire, UK
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14x12
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Earlier in the year we performed an artificial swarm. The queen hatched and we left her alone until we thought we had given her enough time to mate and start laying. We checked the hive and everything seemed ok as we saw a few eggs and then a week later we found just a small patch of sealed brood and one queen cell and no queen. We shut the hive up and left them alone again and waited, hopefully for another queen to hatch. Two weeks ago we went in and found eggs. We were advised that as she was new, to leave her alone for a couple of weeks. This weekend we checked to see if all was well. We also decided to check the supers for stores and found eggs above the queen excluder. There are two supers and eggs in all of them, including mulitple eggs in cells. Our mentor believes we have a drone laying worker as there was no sign of a queen. Once the cells are sealed we will know for sure. I understand there is no point in adding eggs as they believe they are queen right so will not make themselves a new queen. He has kindly offered us a queen and says we need to perform what we believe to be a shook swarm. As all our bees are flying bees they should all return to the hive. However, wont the drone laying worker come back too or does egg laying making her too fat to fly, or once there is a new queen in the hive will she stop laying? Also does she look different from an ordinary worker. Someone said try and find her but we had no luck at the weekend. We assumed she looks the same as the other bees. Any advice would be appreciated. many thanks
 
Laying workers, there could be many in there,even hundreds,not just one,and yes they can fly just fine.
 
Thanks Hivemaker. So really there is no point in shaking them all out? Will they accept a new mated Queen or is that a waste of time as well, bearing in mind they have been queenless for so long?
 
They will most likely kill her....the best way to rectify the problem is by adding frames of open brood over a few weeks....getting a bit late in the season for that though.

"does egg laying making her too fat to fly"

Another myth.....even a fully in lay queen can still fly.
 
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When you say multiple eggs in the supers are we talking 3+ and attached to the sides of the cells or a couple at the bottom of the cells.

Neither is conclusive but a couple of eggs at the bottom of a cell may be a young queen and eggs on the side of the cells indicates laying workers.
 
I think the misunderstanding of shaken laying workers being unable to fly back may come from the suggestion in a couple of books to shake colonies with laying workers in front of other Q+ hives to sort them out
 
Interestingly, I shook out a hive of laying workers yesterday. After i had done so I moved the box another fifty yards away to avoid the mass of bees flying around, in order to remove the bees that were left on the combs. I found two workers with eggs sticking out of their bums. Needless to say I squished them, but there was absolutely no difference in size or shape to normal large workers. They were reluctant to fly though, so there is hope that other laying workers did not make it back to the other hive on the same stand.

I decided to give the bee-less broodbox to another colony and made the stupid mistake of thinking all the workers would be out foraging, because it was a lovely day. I opened the hive and received a very uncharitable welcome, considering I was adding substantially to their stores. Only three stings (through the suit), but my they were cross, and looked as if they were all at home by 5.30. Austerity cuts must be reaching the bees and overtime has been banned!
 
interesting though re old wisdom.

laying workers are physiologically more like nurse bees than foragers (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022191008000346)

perhaps the answer is to do a gradual procedure using snelgrove board? not sure if anyone tried this but here goes:

turn old hive 180 degrees. place any frames of JUST stores/pollen in new box with frames of foundation or drawn comb.
add snelgrove with entrance to front open on top of old box. put new box on top.
add new queen or test frame to top box.
after a few days (next day?) all foragers should be out of the old box which can be removed to leave to die off or get treated with petrol.

come to think of it you could just put the new box in old hive site and old hive next to it with entrance 180 degrees away.
 
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Thanks, this sounds like a plan. Not so stressful to the bees if we just stand the old hive next to the new one but turn the entrance round. Hopefully most of the bees will fly straight back to the new hive as they are all flying bees and the drone laying workers will stay with the old hive which means just a few bees left. Will discuss with our mentor.
 
Or they may just re-orientate themselves to the old hive...lol.
 
"Or they may just re-orientate themselves to the old hive...lol."

surely unlikely over the limited timespan needed to ensure maximal depletion of foragers from the old hive - i presume by next evening you'd be sorted.
 
I have moved box's of laying workers around the same apairy...several times,even into the next field to bleed off the flying bees,very few have left the box,how many times have you had to deal with laying workers Dr S.
 
once - failed shakeout. hive full of tiny drones that could get through an excluder. petrolled.

surely some bleed off is better than nothing.
 
I checked an A S for the first time two weeks ago and found the queen but she wasn't laying,I checked again last friday evening and found some eggs but no queen,the eggs were all in the bottom but some of the cells had four or five eggs in the bottom,so I looked for the queen again on sunday afternoon when there were less bees in the hive,and still couldn't find the queen,there were two half frames laid up and all the eggs are in the bottom of the cell,I looked again today and still couldn't find a queen,the brood pattern has the more mature grubs in the centre of the frames and they get smaller as they expand to the edge then eggs,its a small colony with only four frames covered with bees,me and my daughter have looked really thoroughly on two occasions but we can't find a queen,is it possible we have laying workers?
 
Laying Workers


When the hive is queenless, and therefore broodless, for several weeks sometimes some workers develop the ability to lay eggs. It's not actually the lack of a queen, but the lack of brood. But the lack of brood is caused by the lack of a queen. These are usually haploid (infertile with a half set of chromosomes) and will all develop into drones.
Symptoms

Also the laying workers lay these in worker cells, in addition to drone cells and usually lays several in each cell. Laying worker eggs are usually on the side of the cell instead of the bottom except in drone cells. A hive with lots of drones is a symptom of laying workers as are the multiple eggs in the cell.

Sometimes a queen, when she starts laying after a time of not laying, will lay a few double eggs but she usually stops after a day or two. The laying workers will lay three or four to a cell in almost every cell. The difficulty is that the bees think they have a queen (the laying workers) and will not accept one. The laying workers are virtually impossible to find. I have found one in a two frame nuc by studying every bee until I saw one lay, but this is impractical in a full sized hive since there would be too many bees and too many laying workers.
Solutions
Simplest, least trips to the beeyard
Shakeout and forget

In my opinion there are only two practical solutions. The simplest solution if you have several hives and especially if the laying worker hive is a long trip, is just shake all the bees in front of the various other hives and divvy all the combs out to the other hives. This is my preferred method for an outyard or a small hive. It doesn't waste your time and money trying to requeen a hive that is going to reject the queen anyway. This is the method of least time spent on interventions and most predictable outcome.

If you really want to have that many hives, you can pull some frames from them several weeks after the shake out and do a split with some brood from all or several of your hives. A frame of open brood and emerging brood and honey and pollen from each and you'll have a nice split.
Most successful but more trips to the beeyard
Give them open brood

The only other really practical method, in my opinion, is to add a frame of open brood every week until they rear a queen. Usually by the second or third frame of open brood they will start queen cells. This is simple enough when the hive is in your backyard. Not so easy in an outyard 60 miles away.
Other less successful methods

I would do one of the above, but if you want to know every possible method that I've tried, here are the things I have done that sometimes work. Note some appear to be, and are, slight variations of the same theme.

1) If you have several weak laying worker hives and at least one strong queenright hive, put all the laying worker hives on the strong queenright hive. The resulting confusion between several hives will usually settle down to one queenright hive.

2) Put a box with some empty comb on the bottom, a double screen on top of that and the old brood nest on top of that. Put the top entrance in the opposite direction. The field bees will leave the top box and return to the bottom one. After a day you have only nurse bees and the laying worker in the top. Remove them and 24 hours later introduce a queen to the bottom box. Then shake out the top box in front of the other hives and give the honey and pollen back to the original hive. Freeze the drone brood and give it to a strong hive to clean up.

3) Put a queen cell in (either a frame from a hive trying to supersede or swarm or one that you made by queen rearing techniques). Sometimes they will let the queen emerge. Usually they will tear it down.

4) Put a virgin queen in. Just smoke it heavily and run her in. Sometimes they will accept her. Usually they will ball her.

5) Put a laying worker hive over a queenright hive on a double screen board. After about a week, do a newspaper combine. Usually they will accept the queen. Sometimes they will kill the queen in the queenright hive and you now have a very large laying worker hive.

6) Start a nuc with some brood from another hive, if you have one, or just do a shaken swarm from your hive, if it's your only one, and introduce the queen to that nuc. When she's laying nicely and there is open brood in the nuc, do a newspaper combine or, to stack the deck even more, put them on a double screen board for a few weeks and then do the newspaper combine.

7) Put a laying worker hive over a queenright hive on a double screen board and after three weeks, shake the laying worker hive out in front of the queen right hive. This almost always works.

8) Make a queenright nuc from a queen and some brood from a queenright hive. Put the nuc over a double screen board over the laying worker hive. After three weeks do a newspaper combine. Usually this works. Sometimes they kill the queen.

9) Put a frame of emerging brood with a queen in a push in cage in the laying worker hive. When they are no longer biting the cage and killing the emerging attendants, release her. This usually works. Sometimes they will kill the queen.
More info on laying workers
Brood pheromones

It's the pheromones from open brood that suppress the laying workers from developing, but some do anyway. It is NOT the queen pheromone as many of the older books suggest.

See page 11 of Wisdom of the hive:

"the queen's pheromones are neither necessary nor sufficient for inhibiting worker's ovaries. Instead, they strongly inhibit the workers from rearing additional queens. It is now clear that the pheromones that provide the proximate stimulus for workers to refrain from laying eggs come mainly from the brood, not from the queen (reviewed in Seeling 1985; see also Willis, Winston, and Slessor 1990)."

There are always multiple laying workers even in a queenright hive

"Anarchistic bees" are ever present but usually in small enough numbers to not cause a problem and are simply policed by the workers UNLESS they need drones. The number is always small as long as ovary development is suppressed.

See page 9 of "The Wisdom of the Hive"

"Although worker honey bees cannot mate, they do possess ovaries and can produce viable eggs; hence they do have the potential to have male offspring (in bees and other Hymenoptera, fertilized eggs produce females while unfertilized eggs produce males). It is now clear, however, that this potential is exceedingly rarely realized as long as a colony contains a queen (in queenless colonies, workers eventually lay large numbers of male eggs; see the review in Page and Erickson 1988). One supporting piece of evidence comes from studies of worker ovary development in queenright colonies, which have consistently revealed extremely low levels of development. All studies to date report far fewer than 1 % of workers have ovaries developed sufficiently to lay eggs (reviewed in Ratnieks 1993; see also Visscher 1995a). For example, Ratnieks dissected 10,634 worker bees from 21 colonies and found that only 7 had moderately developed egg (half the size of a completed egg) and that just one had a fully developed egg in her body."

If you do the math, in a normal booming queenright hive of 100,000 bees that's 70 laying workers. In a laying worker hive it's much higher.

http://www.bushfarms.com/beeslayingworkers.htm
 

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