[music]
Ok so today we kind of have an abnormal colony
condition again, it seems to be what I do most in
these videos, but anyways we have a condition
called laying workers here and it's exactly that.
Previous in this kind of colony's history something
has gone wrong with the queen the queen has
failed and that can happen for a whole wack
of reasons, so we won't quite go into that
but at the end of the day the queen has died
and what's now happened is those worker bees
have failed to replace her and with that there
is no brood, no queen laying any eggs so the
workers have been broodless for an amount
of time and after a certain amount
of time the workers then start to develop
their own ovaries and they don't quite have
the plumbing that queens do so they can't go
out and mate and basically they start developing
their own ovaries, because they can't mate
they lay unfertilized eggs which become drones
and basically this colony turns from a queen
right colony into mostly workers, into mostly
drones and then peters out from there.
So it's kind of an end of a line situation for your
bees and your bee colony there, but we're going
to go in and see kind of the signs and symptoms
and afterwards we'll show you
what you can do with that.
So we'll head on into this colony
we do treat it like a regular colony we smoke it,
take the lid off,
the inner cover,
put that at the front, give them a couple puffs
of smoke, now we'll get right on in.
So I'll skip that second frame because
there is not much activity on that one.
I'm pulling out the first frame
we are already seeing pretty much everything
that says laying workers.
So you can see just the population
of adult bees are mostly drones, so this has
kind of already gone on for a while where the
worker bees have laid a lot of drones, raise those
and then they've hatched and kind of become
a part of the population.
You can see here too, this is about this is one of the
only few drones here that is actually of a
regular size, so this one right below my finger
has hatched out of an actual drone sized cell
and as it walks by other drones, get a good look
at just how small these other drones are
compared to this big boy and the reason for that is
again these laying workers, they can't mate,
but they think they can and so they are laying
unfertilized eggs in what should be worker
sized cells, cells for fertilized eggs, so a
lot of these drones are a lot smaller just because
they have come from those worker sized cells.
And in the middle here you can actually see
where that is going on, so these cells
are raised it kind of looks very rigid
and they are kind of little mountains here or
there mountain ridges and that's basically
again because the drones are larger than the
worker bees they've had to draw those out,
so we are seeing lots of that here.
A couple cool things you can see some of these
larva have died and are starting to turn a little
off colour, again another big sign and symptom
of laying workers and the reason for that
is as you can see on this frame there's not
a lot of worker bees and lots of drones the
worker bees are what take care of those larva,
so these larvas aren't getting the attention
they need and they are starting to die of
probably starvation, something like that just
neglect so that's another good sign, symptom
of the laying workers there.
I'll flip this over,
see what's going on, but pretty much
the same as the other side.
So we'll go into the next frame, should be more
going on, we're kind of getting now
more into the middle of the cluster.
So here we go again just lots of drones, small drones.
We are seeing a lot more drone laid in
worker-sized cells.
Here is something kind of interesting.
So they even though they have gone into that
full laying worker mode you can see right
here a bunch of queen cups which they
are trying to raise queens out of.
It's a bit of a last ditch effort, there are more than
likely drone larva in there, they are just
kind of going through the motions and trying
the best they can to salvage the situation,
but that's what's happening here they will
cap those out, but a queen will not hatch out of there.
And the only last thing to note is,
this is always a tricky one to talk about
because it's not so much if you see eggs
laid as if they were laid by a worker that
it means it's laying workers, it's more of a
you see eggs laid like the patch down in here.
So a queen laid egg should be almost directly
at the bottom looking back up at you,
but a lot of these worker laid eggs are going to
be laid at the side of the comb and there
is going to be multiple eggs per cell,
so that is something to kind of raise your attention.
There are other instances like in the springtime
when the queen is really ready to go
if there is a weak colony sometimes she will
lay more than one egg per cell, so just seeing
eggs laid in this orientation and this
number doesn't mean 100% that you have laying and
workers, you have to go and see those other signs and
symptoms like the drone larva and the
worker sized cells and all that sort of stuff.
So we'll get a good little shot of that
and again you can see some other things like
some drones that are starting to hatch out
and are not making it and just again because nobody
is very few workers and not very many of them
are able to take care of them on their way out.
Turn and we've seen both sides of that,
so set that one aside and I'll just have one
more little peek at the next frame
see what's going on there.
Oh and here we actually are able to see
so here is a queen cell that has hatched,
there is a hole chewed out right through
the bottom of it, and a hole through the side,
so this obviously happened a while ago, the
queen hatched out and now just to get rid
of it the bees were starting to chew down
the sides and tear that cell apart.
So obviously they tried something hatched out
but that didn't work and then it just progressed
to this point of laying workers.
So that's kind of very interesting again,
but again just the same sort of laying worker pattern.
So the only other one sign and symptom
that unfortunately we didn't have here because
this wasn't a very strong colony to begin with,
sometimes this laying worker pattern you'll
see it in the honey supers especially at the bottom,
that bottom honey super that's right on top of
that queen excluder, pretty much any time you
see this sort of thing above the queen excluder
that totally you can rule out a drone laying queen
and go straight to laying workers.
They will continue that laying worker pattern
all throughout the colonies and so worker
bees can get through that queen excluder,
but just unfortunately this was a little weaker
so we're not able to show you that.
The last thing to kind of talk about here
is what you can do with this.
Again, this colony here is a bit of a lost cause,
you can introduce as many queens as you want to it,
they are not going to accept a queen, so when we have
a colony like this the best thing to do is
either take this colony away to the edge of
the woods or something like that and just
shake out all these bees.
The workers who have developed their ovaries
are a little heavier and stuff like the theory the
thinking is they'll kind of be left where you
shook them and then all the other good
productive bees will be able to fly back to
the colony and get back into it, but while
you shake those out you bring back the colony
and introduce a nuc that you made up from
another colony.
So put a nuc in there with good,
proper queen laid brood and either bring
the queen with it or introduce a queen to
that and that should kind of solve that problem
for that colony.
So you are using this colony and kind of
keeping some of those bees that are
part of that colony, but you are having to
introduce other bees to it in order to kind of normalize
it and make it worth keep on going.
And that's our laying workers.
Hey guys so we have another
picture of sacbrood here, which is another
disease it's a bit it's a stress disease, which
you typically see in the spring but normally
your bee colonies as they go through the year
and get stronger and healthier will
grow out of this.
If you do want to take action
the best thing to do is requeen the colony
and that typically kind of resolves that.
The picture you are looking at is early stages
of this sacbrood disease.
As you can see the larvas
in the cell has kind of traveled to the bottom
of the cell and is curling up through the middle
of the cell and kind of poking out to the other
to the top of that cell and that's a
typical sort of shape of sacbrood, some say
it's like a shrine or shoe with that curve.
Another way to diagnose that is just to pull
that out with a pair of tweezers or anything
like that and grab that and then you'll see why
they call it sacbrood, there will be kind of a juicy
part of the larva that looks like a sac,
everything is turned to mush in the middle.
Just another quick little test if you are confused
between this and some sort of foulbrood is to
stick a twig in there, pull that out and
hopefully you don't see any sort of ropy bits,
and you can check that out online what that
should look like, but that is sacbrood, something
to notice but not the biggest pest
or disease out there.