How to fix a laying worker hive
Something about laying workers brings out the wizard in us. We think up convoluted ways to rid ourselves of these miscreant creatures, most of which don’t work. Carry the box to the edge of the apiary, turn in a circle with your eyes closed and a drone in your teeth, shake the bees out of the box, apply the appropriate spell, swallow the drone, then beat the workers back to the hive armed with newspaper and a double screen board. Nothing to it.
I’ve seen long lists of not-so-successful ways of dealing with laying workers, and I always wonder why we bother to memorialize our failures for future beekeepers. All the methods for dealing with laying workers will fail unless you first correct the problem—and the problem is a lack of open brood pheromone in the hive.
How they come to be
Many misconceptions surround laying workers, but if you understand how they come about, you won’t be confused about what you have, how they got there, or how to get rid of them.
The thing you hear most often is, “I think I have a laying worker.” The misconception here is that a laying worker is much like a queen, and like a queen, there is just one. But when you think about how they come about, that doesn’t make any sense.
Picture this: Your colony has lost its queen. Like the old lady who lived in a shoe, she had so many children, she didn’t know what to do. So she stroked and died. Phew! Now, in this particular hive the workers tried to raise a new queen, but they failed. So after about ten days—give or take—the last eggs your queen laid have become capped pupae. There is no open brood left in the hive.
Why so many laying workers?
It turns out that open worker brood pheromone is the stuff that suppresses the worker bees’ ovaries. Queen pheromone may play a part as well, but it’s the open brood pheromone that is the primary chemical suppressant. Without a source of these chemicals in the hive, the workers’ ovaries begin to mature. It doesn’t happen overnight, but gradually the workers begin to lay eggs. The exact time varies, but you may begin to see worker eggs about three weeks after the loss of your queen.
Think about it. You have thousands of worker bees in your hive and, all at the same time, they lose the open brood pheromone. That means that many, many workers may have maturing ovaries, and they are maturing simultaneously. They all won’t develop into layers; for whatever reason, only some do. But it’s not just one, it is many—perhaps dozens, perhaps hundreds.
Soon these workers are laying eggs all over the place. They leave multiple eggs in cells or on top of stored pollen. The pattern is one of randomness. Because worker bees have no way to mate, all of the eggs are haploid (having a single set of chromosomes) and all will develop into drones.
Not all brood pheromone is equal
The real kicker is that while your hive may suddenly develop lots of open drone brood, open drone brood does not produce the pheromone that suppresses the laying workers. Only open worker brood does the trick.
However, the laying workers produce enough queen-like pheromone that the colony will not accept a new queen, so introduced queens are usually killed. No matter what incantation you whisper over the hive, or how surreptitiously you introduce a new queen, most of the time it won’t work.
Dumping the bees at the edge of the apiary (to rid yourself of not-so-agile laying workers) and introducing a new queen to the returning bees doesn’t work either because you haven’t cured the problem—the colony is still without open worker brood. The workers will kill the new queen before she can produce any brood, and more of the workers will begin to lay and take the place of those you tossed out.
Saving the colony
The only way to save the colony is to suppress the laying workers’ ovaries. This can be done by adding open worker brood to the hive. But just as it took a while to develop the workers’ ovaries, it will take a while to suppress them. If you add a queen too soon after adding the open brood, the workers will kill her too.
One of the best ways to save the hive is to introduce a frame of open worker brood every few days until the bees begin to raise a supersedure queen. How often you have to add brood depends on how old the brood is. Eggs remain eggs for three days and larvae are open for about 5.5 to 6 days. Assuming that most pheromone is produced by larvae rather than eggs, a new frame of open brood should be introduced at least once every five or six days if the larvae are very young, but more frequently if the larvae are old.
Once the colony begins to raise a queen on its own, you can either let the bees raise it or you can introduce a queen. The building of supersedure cells indicates their willingness to accept a new queen, so it is fairly safe to introduce a queen at that time.
Using the same reasoning, you can combine the laying worker hive with a nuc that contains a queen and open brood. The nuc needs to be separated by a double screen or similar device to keep the queen safe until the workers’ ovaries are fully suppressed. Allow about three weeks before combining.
Dismantling the hive
Other than suppressing the workers’ ovaries, the only other thing you can do is dismantle the hive and shake the bees out in the vicinity of your other hives (after you’ve thrown salt over your left shoulder, of course). If the colony has been queenless for a long time, it may be small, aggressive, and hardly worth your time. In that case, you can just shake your equipment free of bees. Some will find a home in one of the other hives and some will die, but in any case you will be rid of the laying worker problem until the next time it happens.