Egg laying workers, but when did they start? Newbie wants to know.

[ugcheleuce]

Hello everyone

What I would like today is some confirmation of logic. I'm a new beekeeper and I'm currently doing a beekeeping course with about 20 other people.

8 June visit:

Our beekeeping teacher gave each of us three frames with BRIAS and honey (no queen), which we placed into a six-framer to take home. I could not take it "home" because the neighbours forbid it, so I took it to the bee club's bee stall (some 20 minutes away by car, or 40 minutes by bicycle).

The idea was that the bees would notice the absence of the queen, then build queen cells. After 10 days, we would break all the queen cells and on the same day introduce a caged queen. Three to four days later, the caged queen would be free, would go on her bridal flight, would start laying eggs, etc. That was the theory. It worked like that, for most of us. For three of us (including me), there were complications.

The complication was this: there weren't enough frames for everyone, so three of us got two frames from the hive that everyone else's frames came from, plus one frame from another hive which caused the complication. I still don't quite understand it (perhaps you can tell me), but the effect was that in my case, when I visted the hive 10 days after creating it, I found two opened queen cells instead of all closed queen cells.

18 June visit:

We all removed the incompleted queen cells and then introduced a caged queen. I also introduced the caged queen, but that evening when I looked at the photos I took, I realised that some of the queen cells had already been opened. This meant that I had an unmarked queen already. I notified the teacher, and on 19 June he visited my hive, confirmed by suspicions, and killed the unmarked queen.

22 June visit:

I visited the hive, to take out the empty queen cage, and at that time I saw the queen (with a nice red dot on her), and she was free from the cage.

6 July visit (14 days later):

I did not visit my hive for 14 days because I was advised not to disturb the bees. It was also quite cold on the days that I had been able to go and I'm not sure if the bees would have been happy to see me. And anyway, I was waiting for the inevitable to happen: queen on bridal flight, then first eggs, etc.

Anyway, today when I came to the hive, the queen was nowhere to be found, and there was an open queen cell and a closed queen cell, and closed drone brood, and lots of larvae, and... and... multiple eggs per cell in several places.

Now I would like you to help me do the calculations and speculate about what had happened.

Two options present themselves to me:

1. The queen went on her bridal flight, got injured, and didn't return.

2. The workers did not like the marked queen (after all, they had had their own queen already at the time when she was introduced, so they were no longer hopelessly queenless when she was introduced), and they killed her.

Brood cells are closed up 13 days after the egg was laid, isn't that right? And today I saw that I already have closed brood (and by the size of it, drone brood in worker sized cells). This means that at the latest the workers must have started laying eggs one day after I had checked the hive (and seen the queen) on 22 June.

How long does it usually take for workers to become egg laying workers after the queen is gone? Could it be that when the unmarked queen was killed, even though the marked queen's cage was already present, that the workers thought that they had lost the queen and did not regard the new queen as their queen yet and so became egg laying workers?

Your opinions would be appreciated.

The upside of all this is that I got some nice pictures of some really odd egg laying patterns.

Samuel

 

[Hivemaker.]

Brood cells are closed up 13 days after the egg was laid, isn't that right?

How long does it usually take for workers to become egg laying workers after the queen is gone?

Eight days from egg laid until sealed cell, then sealed for thirteen days before emerging for workers.

Depends on the strain of bee, although there are also laying workers in q- colonies.

 

[ugcheleuce]

Eight days from egg laid until sealed cell, then sealed for thirteen days before emerging for workers.

Aah, I got it the wrong way around. Well, that gives me 5 more days to play with... and it makes me feel less bad about not catching this sooner.

Depends on the strain of bee...

Well, I can't be very specific about that, except to say that the queen I introduced was "purebred" Buckfast (which I take to mean F1) and the existing bees came from Buckfast either F1 or F2.

 

[ugcheleuce]

Here's a nice picture that leaves little doubt.

 

[Queens59]

Silly question - is there such a thing as purebred Buckfast?? Especially as Buckfast themselves say their bees are local mongrels now??

 

[Hivemaker.]

Especially as Buckfast themselves say their bees are local mongrels now??

Imported from Batsis in Greece.

 

[ugcheleuce]

Silly question - is there such a thing as purebred Buckfast??

Well, I think one has to take the term "purebred" with a pinch of salt when it comes to Buckfast, but I think what is meant is that the breeding was controlled to a high degree. The queen rearer knows with a high degree of certainty where the parent bees came from. Our teacher used the term "purebred" but at the same time he warns about not taking F scales too seriously.

 

[ugcheleuce]

Imported from Batsis in Greece.

I'm fairly certain that the parent queen (or parent of parent) of the queen that I had originally introduced was from Denmark. Anyway, I don't think one should go into the lineage details too much -- the bee was what we call a "Buckfast bee", and to me that merely means that it has a high likelihood of having certain broadly defined characteristics. Oh, and the bees that were already in the hive when the queen was introduced was from somewhat related stock, i.e. they weren't completely different e.g. locally indigenous black honey bees.

 

[Hivemaker.]

I'm fairly certain that the parent queen (or parent of parent) of the queen that I had originally introduced was from Denmark.

It was in reply to Queens59 and some of the local mongrels at Buckfast Abbey....which they bought from Batsis in Greece (via Bickerstaffes) last year.