- Hi there, we're here today to talk about laying worker colonies.
We've got one right here in front of us, so we're gonna have a look at that.
The background behind this colony is it was a split that I made up and then I introduced
a queen cell.
Usually that works out, in this case it didn't.
So the colony got into a hopelessly queen-less situation.
And what happens then, when there is no queen present, her smell is gone and once all the
brood hatches out, there's no brood smell either, so there's actually a brood pheromone.
Both of those smells inhibit the ovary development in workers.
When they're gone, worker ovaries start to develop and the workers lay eggs.
'Course the workers haven't mated so those eggs that they lay are drone eggs and so you
get drones developed.
It's basically the colony's last ditch effort of expressing it's genes from an evolutionary
perspective.
These little drones that are reared in worker-size cells are viable, they can fly out and mate.
But the colony itself is on a downward spiral and it will perish.
We have the opportunity to do a few things with the colony, we'll address those.
So let's have a look first, we'll open up the colony.
And what I want to do is show you what the brood looks like.
Initially, when you get laying workers starting to lay, all you have to look at is eggs and
you'll see multiple eggs in cells, you'll see eggs stuck to the side of the cells rather
than nicely placed in the bottom.
So that in itself looks different.
But once the brood starts to develop, you'll see cappings that look unusual.
Everything looks a little unusual.
It's not a very strong hive, we have bees from about here to here.
But the important thing is lookin' at the brood here.
So, we'll have a close look here.
I see cappings here that are bulged out and it's a very spotty brood pattern.
Over in this area, you can see they're trying to raise a queen.
That will not be successful.
It's actually a drone that's developing inside that cell there, but they're trying their
best to raise a new queen.
And those cappings for the drones are kinda bulged out from the side, and I'll just hold
this steady here, so they're slightly bulged out because they need to make a little extra
space for that drone to fit in there.
The eggs have been laid in worker sized cells, so there's not quite enough room for the drone
so they extend the length of the cell.
Let's see what else we can find.
Likely more of the same and I do see that.
We can also see that there's not enough bees to really care for this brood.
So I see larva dying at different ages here and it's generally a pretty unpleasant look.
That frame's a good one to see those bulged out cells there, there's not so many bees
on there so we can see a little bit better.
So those are the symptoms, but now the question is what do we do with this?
Because they don't have a queen, the first inclination might be to introduce a queen
to the colony, but a laying worker colony will not accept a queen.
So you're wasting a queen by trying to do that.
So the next option is to, and what we generally do, is just unite the colony with another
hive.
If we unite that colony with another hive, then the smell of the brood is present from
the queen right colony and that shuts down the laying workers.
We can even then split that second box off later and make up a second colony.
But, we've shut down the laying workers by adding it to a queen right colony.
Another option is to just shake the bees out in front of another hive, you just shake 'em
out on the ground, ideally into a hive that's nearby because the bees are gonna fly back
to that location anyway.
It doesn't help the colony a lot but it's little bit of a help to the other colony and
then we could take this comb home and store it away.
The risk there is wax moth.
If you have this brood comb not being protected by bees, if you're trying to store it, the
wax moth can take over.
So you have to either freeze it or store it in a very cool location so wax moth won't
develop.
Another scenario is to introduce a nucleus colony into this hive or to make up a split
in the yard and introduce it into the colony.
If you're going to be doing that, shake the bees out from the laying worker colony some
distance away from the hive, 15, 20 feet away from the hive.
The laying workers will not actually be able to fly home and so they won't interfere with
the acceptance of the queen that's in the split or the nuc that you're putting into
that colony.
We're gonna go back to our first scenario, which is my favorite, and we're going to introduce
or rather, unite this colony with a queen right colony.
And so, let's go through that process here.
So we'll move over to the queen right colony next door.
And whenever you're moving a colony to unite it, I always move the weak hive to the location
of the strong hive, that way you're not losing forager bees from the strong colony.
It's okay to lose a few worker bees from the weaker of the two colonies, so that's the
rational behind moving the weak one to the location of the strong one.
So we've got a queen excluder on there and we're gonna take that off.
This is going to become a double brood chamber colony.
And we're going to lay down a sheet of newspaper on top of that.
And cover that up, stick it down a little bit there.
One thing that works well is if you find which side the wind is coming from, and lay your
hive tool down on there, that'll prevent the paper from blowing out of your way when you're
shifting the box.
That always seems to blow away just when you go to set that other box in place.
But I need that for a second to pry this free, okay, we'll set our hive tool down there.
And now, we're just shifting this box over.
We'll slip out our hive tool.
We'll put our queen excluder back on.
And then we'll put our super back in place.
Now what we have happening here, we have our queen down here.
The worker bees from below and from above will chew through that newspaper and it's
a gradual introduction of the queenless bees to the queen right colony.
Once those laying worker bees smell brood and the queen, they will stop laying eggs
and everything normalizes within the colony.
As I mentioned previously, this box could then be split off later to make up another
colony.
We're at the middle of July right now, so it's getting to late in the year to be splitting
colonies, so this one will stay like this.
It'll over winter as a double brood chamber hive and we'll split it off next time.
You might be wondering about the bees in this top super that came from this hive here, there's
no issue with a queen acceptance here because there is no queen up in this area, so those
bees will merge together.
Newspaper will chew out and everything normalizes.
Just a few little ways of dealing with laying worker colonies.
Thanks for watching, see you next time.