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Subject: Orange County, NC Beekeepers
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Re: [ocba] Multiple eggs per cell: laying workers vs overzealous newbie queen
- From: Randall Austin <ra41717 AT gmail.com>
- To: Daniel Kenan <dan.kenan AT gmail.com>, ocba <ocba AT lists.ibiblio.org>
- Subject: Re: [ocba] Multiple eggs per cell: laying workers vs overzealous newbie queen
- Date: Mon, 20 Apr 2015 12:28:47 -0400
Dan,
You would logically think that's the case, but it isn't how it works out in practice. There are always a few laying workers in a hive. Normally, the housekeeping bees recognize their eggs as being "not right" (for example, they don't have queen marker pheromone on them) and they eat them. However in a hive that feels it is hopelessly queenless, the worker bees accept the laying worker eggs as being "normal" and act as if they have a queen; they are engaging in a last-chance Hail Mary play to at least get some of their genes out in the world through drones. So technically the real problem isn't laying workers, it is worker bees that embrace laying workers. If you combine these confused workers with a healthy queen-right hive, they will "reset" and return to behaving as they should. Another way to reset a laying worker colony is to put a frame of open worker brood in the hive. Repeat at regular intervals over a couple of weeks so there is always open worker brood present. Eventually the worker brood pheromone will "reset" the housekeeping bees so they'll again recognize good eggs from bad ones and their raise a normal queen from the larvae you are introducing. This method works but consumes too much time and resources to be practical. So -- when you combine a laying worker hive with a queen-right hive, there are two possible outcomes: 1) the "messed up" bees convert the queen-right bees to their weird suicidal cult, or 2) the emotionally-stable queen-right bees provide a smoothing influence over the psycho bees and reset them. As it turns out, the second option is what happens. I wouldn't try this with 50,000 messed-up bees versus a thousand good ones, but with more good ones than bad ones and lots of "good brood" (open worker brood) in the queen-right hive, this is what I expect to happen. Also remember to put the "bad" bees in the "good" bees hive, not the other way around. Randall On 4/20/2015 11:22 AM, Daniel Kenan wrote: CAP37QBEBZgS3ipDASCr+NnT3gmqxPLcqydigLwRAaBLVcjA6eg AT mail.gmail.com" type="cite"> |
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Re: [ocba] Multiple eggs per cell: laying workers vs overzealous newbie queen,
Daniel Kenan, 04/20/2015
- Re: [ocba] Multiple eggs per cell: laying workers vs overzealous newbie queen, Randall Austin, 04/20/2015
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