Queen laying multiple eggs per cell

[Finman]

.
Change the queen. No hope with that.
Queen does not notice that there is an egg allready.

.

 

[Teemore]

Down Bee - the move to the nuc is a good idea. The bees may find it easier to maintain brood raising temperature in a smaller space and this may help them get going again. Make sure they have some stores close to the cluster when you move them into the Nuc. A replacement Queen a little later in the year may also help.

 

[notmilk]

To my (admittedly limited) knowledge, what you have here is a case of laying workers. The queen in unable to lay eggs or has died, the colony has been unable to raise a new queen so have become queenless. The ovaries of some workers enlarge and they start to lay eggs. Not being able to mate, they can only lay drone eggs and they do this in worker cells. The resulting drones are small and useless..
Do you see small isolated drone cells made out of worker cells?

 

[notmilk]

Solving laying-worker problems

* move the entire colony 200m and take out all the frames
* shake the frames onto the ground and brush all the bees off them
* set aside any frames with drone brood or eggs to deal with later
* return the bee-less hive to its original position and place a frame of young brood, a queen cell or a caged queen in it. Feed if necessary.
* Close the hive and leave it alone for a week
* Clean all the eggs and drone cells out of the set-aside brood frames and return them to the hive.

The theory is that the non-laying, normal worker bees will know the area and will fly back to the hive whereas the laying workers may never have left the hive so wont know the way home.

(I do hope my bee book isn't out of date)

 

[oliver90owner]

(I do hope my bee book isn't out of date)

The main failing of your book is that it does not take into account what the poster wrote. viz: "I now have a queen"

 

[Finman]

* move the entire colony 200m and take out all the frames


The theory is that the non-laying, normal worker bees will know the area and will fly back to the hive whereas the laying workers may never have left the hive so wont know the way home.

there is no any more that theory. University of Sheffield has revield it about 10 years ago.

Laying workers become when colony is desparately queenless. When you give normal worker larvae, they are able to rear queen cells and laying workers disappear.

.

Queen is violated. Change it. No reason to invent, why it is not normal.
It will not become better.

.

 

[notmilk]

Thanks finman, I have a lot to learn!

 

[masterBK]

I have a lot to learn!
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You do indeed. Laying workers do not spend all their time laying but do other things including foraging so they certainly know their way back to the hive. Requeening laying worker colonies by whatever method is difficult, usually fails and is never worth it. The bees in the colony are old and the colony riddled with Varroa. The shake out method works if you remove the hive from the original site so the bees fly back to enter and bolster an adjacent colony. I think it better to kill the occupants of a laying worker colony by spraying combs of bees them with detergent water.