This month I answered many questions about whether a hive was queenright or not. Sometimes just waiting a little while was the best course of action. But beekeepers are justifiably worried about doing that because of the risk of laying workers in the hive. Fortunately, it doesn’t happen overnight.
Laying workers: a colony’s last shot at genetic survival
As the tumultuous swarming season winds down, both bees and beekeepers must reassess the queenright status of each colony. After the complex drama of a swarm and the resulting queen replacement cycles in the original colony, there have been several chances for a failure to occur. And any failure can result in one or more parts of the original colony becoming hopelessly queenless, with no further prospects of regaining a mated queen.
What could go wrong?
The bees in a primary swarm may, or may not, find themselves a satisfactory new home and set up housekeeping again. If a beekeeper captures the primary swarm there is always the risk of queen loss or injury during the hiving.
Afterswarms, or cast swarms, with virgin queens have the same risk of not finding a suitable cavity to move into, but also the added risk that the individual virgin queen fails to get out and mate, or fails to return after mating. With no fertilized eggs in the combs, a cast swarm that loses its queen before she begins to lay is doomed.
And finally, the parent colony has lost its queen and a good share of the younger bees with the primary swarm. Then it suffered additional losses when virgins left with afterswarms. It may also find itself hopelessly queenless due to a mating flight disaster, or accidental damage to the last remaining queen cells that were left behind.
If the biological purpose of a swarm is to propagate a colony’s genetics, it makes sense that the queen cells left behind in the hive are both numerous and have slightly differing developmental timetables. In other words, the bees aren’t putting their genetic eggs all in one basket. They’re hedging their bet to make sure at least one copy of their genetic code remains viable. The wonder isn’t that swarming works, despite its risks, but that it usually works quite well.
However, individual beekeepers often don’t retain all the parts of the divided colony. Sometimes they wind up with the parts that aren’t successful. .
How can you make sure your colonies are all queenright?
After the swarm season wanes, it’s time to take stock and see what can be done to remedy any failures you find.
The first thing to do is decide when a new queen will likely be mated and begining to lay eggs. If you know the date of the swarm, then it’s a safe bet that by the time you are four calendar weeks past that date, the bees remaining in the hive have either successfully regained a new, mated queen, or are not going to do so.
Similarly, a cast swarm hived with a virgin among the bees needs about 10-14 days to get the queen out, mated, and settled down on her job. In between these two parameters, however, there is a gray area when there still is a chance of success.
There is some urgency to resolve this because a colony without the presence of a mated, laying queen is in danger of developing laying workers.
What’s a laying worker?
Laying workers are worker bees whose ovaries begin to develop and allow them to lay eggs. Since they’ve never been mated, these eggs are always haploid (having only half of the set of genetic codes), and will develop into drones. Drones can only pass on their mother’s genetic code, so this is a less-complete version of the hive’s genetics, but better than nothing if the alternative is impending extinction.
What’s the practical result of having laying workers in the hive?
From a beekeeping management point of view, the development of laying workers complicates the picture and makes it difficult to requeen the hive with a mated queen to get the colony back in the brood business. That’s because the presence of laying workers (and it’s rarely only a single one) will cause other workers to attempt to kill the “rival” queen that a beekeeper introduces, even though it is the mated queen that can ensure the colony’s survival, not the faux queens or laying workers.
Many beekeepers appreciate the risk of laying workers, however they associate it with simple queen loss. And indeed, loss of the queen’s pheromones (for whatever reason) primes the initiation of ovary development in some of the colony’s worker bees. But, ultimately, it is the subsequent loss of the pheromones from brood that has a stronger effect in driving the development of laying workers.
This has two hive-management implications: first, that any remaining open, and then, even capped brood may forestall the development of laying workers for a few weeks beyond the loss (or absence) of a queen. And secondarily, the presence of any open brood - even if it’s on a donated frame from another colony – may also suppress the development of laying workers for a further few weeks.
In other words, a donated frame of brood may save the day, allowing the hive to remain in a queen-receptive state while a new queen is procured, or the situation clarified. A frame of brood, by itself, will not interfere with the final stages of a tardy queen’s development, nor with the acceptance of a purchased queen or ripe queen cell.
A neat trick to get the bees to let you know if the hive is queenless
The donated frame from another hive that has eggs or very young brood on it has one other valuable benefit: it will quickly reveal whether the bees themselves perceive the colony to be queenless and in need of an emergency queen. If they do, they will immediately start queen cells with a few of the young-enough larvae on the brood frame. A beekeeper, seeing the start of queen cells, can let the re-queening process continue, or if time is getting short, intervene by installing a mated queen and destroying the queen cells on the donated frame. The cells will be started within five days from the installation of the frame; they can be anywhere on the face of the frame, not along the bottom edge of the frame.
But what if the frame-trick is inconclusive?
If the timeline is now extended beyond a reasonable time for the new queen to reveal her presence, and if a frame of brood with eggs on it doesn’t result in emergency queen cells, but there are still no signs of a queen, what does that mean? At this point, the likelihood that laying workers are already afoot in the hive is increased.
Emergency cell developed on a test frame
How can you be certain you have laying workers?
Laying workers generally look the same as non-laying workers, so spotting them isn’t going to be likely. (And even if you caught one in the act of laying an egg, removing her would only account for one individual laying worker, not all the others.) Laying workers also don’t usually lay continuously; often they do so for only a few hours, before going back to their regular tasks.
To confirm the presence of laying workers, look for cells with multiple eggs in them, sometimes quite startling numbers of eggs. Newly-mated queens can also lay multiple eggs for a few days before settling down to their jobs. There’s a way to differentiate between them, however, from the egg laying pattern.
A queen who is laying multiples will place all of the eggs at the far end of the cell because her abdomen is long enough to reach all the way to the back. In contrast, a laying worker doesn’t develop the same long abdomen, so her eggs will be placed on the sides and tops of cells nearer the entrance since that’s as far in as she can reach. This anatomically-driven difference will help you diagnose what is going on.
Eventually a laying worker’s (drone) larvae will become capped pupae. But unlike regular drone larvae laid in larger cells, these drones will have been laid in worker-sized cells. As they develop, the nurse bees will create little individual silos of comb walls around them to accommodate their increased length.
If you see clear evidence of laying workers, can you still prevent the colony from dying out?
How to "cure" a laying worker hive
Photo Credit: Robert Snyder Courtesy The Bee Informed Partnership Copyright 2020 Used with permission
Multiple eggs in a cell from laying workers
There are no guarantees, but if you remember that it is the lack of brood pheromone that triggered the development of the workers’ ovaries, then providing regular infusions of brood pheromone will begin to repress that ovary development, and forestall ovary development in other workers in the process.
If you used a frame of donated open brood to test for the bees’ awareness of a lack of a queen, you have already taken the first step in curing the problem. Simply keep adding a frame with open brood every 7 days until, finally, the bees begin to make queen cells. Each week when you are preparing to add a frame, examine the previous one for cells. Once you see the cells, you are back at square one and the colony may be ready to accept a real queen.
This process can take up to a month to work through, and by then even with the infusions of new workers from the donated frames, the population may be dwindling. And the odds of successful open-mating are even less certain that late in the season. For that reason, once cells are initiated, most beekeepers would cut to the chase and install a mated queen. The colony may need to receive additional resources of brood to boost its population and frames of stores before winter. And perhaps it will need to be wintered in a nuc box, or reduced-size hive.
Why go to all the trouble to do this just to save a few thousand bees in a doomed hive? Many beekeepers would simply shake the bees out of the hive and put the equipment back into a more-profitable use. There is nothing wrong with that choice.
However, attempting to turn around a laying worker colony is an interesting and educational project to undertake. In early- to mid-summer your other hives can withstand the loss of a few frames of brood. And it is very gratifying, if you can pull it off. What’s the point of keeping bees if they aren’t offering you the chance to stretch your mind? There are far easier – and cheaper - ways to get some exercise in the open air and have some honey for your waffles.
Photo Credit: Dr. Dennis vanEngelsdorp Courtesy The Bee Informed Partnership
Copyright 2020 Used with permission
Drones developing in worker-sized cells
