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Chronological Thread  
  • From: Elisabeth Curtis <granda.curtis AT gmail.com>
  • To: chloe palenchar <cpalenchar AT hotmail.com>
  • Cc: Orange County Bees <ocba AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [ocba] laying workers?
  • Date: Fri, 17 May 2013 08:56:40 -0400

I'm no expert, this being my first brush with laying workers, but for what it's worth, our hive population is definitely dwindling, there are a lot of (very large) drones, and no dead larvae in front of the hive. -Elisabeth


On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 8:32 AM, chloe palenchar <cpalenchar AT hotmail.com> wrote:
I also think I have a hive with laying workers. I made a split around March 19th, and have had some life events make my beekeeping somewhat intermittent since then. I checked in April, saw what looked like laying worker symptoms, but thought there were too many worker bees and not enough drones for that to be that case-- I thought maybe I'd just caught the hive right after all new worker brood had hatched, but drones were not quite hatched. Probably that was wishful thinking. I checked again this week, and the hive still looks the same, so I guess that is laying workers. Some things I noticed that I wasn't expecting based on class/books that I'd read:
1) there really aren't many drones in the hive. The bees have been discarding lots of larvae outside of the hive. Are they killing the drones on purpose because they know they don't need them? Or is this a sign that something else is wrong?
2) There are really still a lot of bees in the hive. I would have thought by now the population would be dwindling, if no workers had hatched since the initial brood from the split. Is that expected?

thanks,

chloe


Date: Thu, 16 May 2013 20:02:53 -0400
From: lewis AT hivebody.com
To: ocba AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Re: [ocba] laying workers?

The newspaper combine is by far my favorite method for fixing the laying workers.  It has never failed me.  In a week or two you can split them back out and either add a queen or let them make their own.
 
Lewis  
 
 


On May 16, 2013 at 7:21 PM Elisabeth Curtis <granda.curtis AT gmail.com> wrote:

One of our hives has the symptoms of laying workers -- spotty drone brood, no worker brood. It's clearly a hive in trouble. Two deeps and a couple of supers. Evidently adding a queen won't work as they will just kill her. What to do?
 
Michael Bush suggests shaking the bees from the hive in front of the other hives, divvying them up and dividing the frames between the other hives as well. 
He also suggests adding a frame of new brood from another hive at intervals and that usually by the 2nd or 3rd try they will raise their own queen.
He has a lot of other suggestions, but most of them he says rarely work and anyway I know they are beyond our skill/time level. One that he says usually works is putting the layer worker hive above a queenright hive with a double screen in between and then after 3 weeks, dumping the layer worker hive bodies out in front of their hive and removing the extra hive bodies. What's a double screen? Our other hives have at least one super; would we put the other hive above them? 
 
Shaking that many bees out of their hive doesn't seem all that easy.
 
Has anyone tried either of these methods? Other methods? YIKES!
 
Any and all ideas gratefully considered. --Elisabeth

 

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