Laying Worker Hives

[Acebird]

Many people have laying worker questions looking for the "how to".  Most newbies think there is only one laying worker that has replaced the queen and do not realize that laying workers exist in a queen right hive.  Hopefully this poll will show that my decision to not waste my time on a laying worker hive is the right decision.

[iddee]

You need a third choice. "Don't try, prefer shakeout."

[Michael Bush]

http://www.bushfarms.com/beeslayingworkers.htm

I think I've tried almost everything... you have to assess how much effort it is worth to you to try to save it.  If it's local and easy to get to and you're a hobbyist then it's worth more effort than if you're commercial and it's a long way from home.

[little john]

Most newbies think there is only one laying worker that has replaced the queen and do not realize that laying workers exist in a queen right hive. 

The subject of Laying Workers seems to be yet another debatable area of beekeeping.  There appears to be two competing views: some authorities suggest that LW exist at all times, and that workers remove their eggs.  The other view is that LW will not exist until the colony becomes queenless (and thus brood-less), as the development of their ovaries is suppressed until that time.

For a short while now I've been using a Joseph Clemens Queenless Hive, a system which relies on a colony maintaining a continuously Queenless status, and thus completely free of any Laying Workers - the presence of which would sabotage that Queenless status just as any genuine Queen would. Using this system requires that open brood be regularly introduced in order to prevent the development of Laying Workers, and thus supports the view that LW won't exist as long as open brood (emitting Brood Pheromone) is present.
LJ

[Jim134]

   At looks like the original question is in the title of the Poll.
 
 I believe this is so you can put down your preferred way of handling this problem.

"Success at converting laying worker hive to queenright hive"

   This one takes very little time. Just shake out in front of a queen right hive.Put your extra equipment in storage or redistribute  throughout your other hives you have. Success rate hundred percent along with very little time.

         BEE HAPPY Jim 134 

[Acebird]

   At looks like the original question is in the title of the Poll.
 
 I believe this is so you can put down your preferred way of handling this problem.

No, this is a poll that you can vote for option 1 or 2.  If you do not get the hive to convert to a queen right state it is a failure.  Please don't rewrite the poll.  Thank you.
"Success at converting laying worker hive to queenright hive"

   

[Jim134]

   At looks like the original question is in the title of the Poll.
 
 I believe this is so you can put down your preferred way of handling this problem.

No, this is a poll that you can vote for option 1 or 2.  If you do not get the hive to convert to a queen right state it is a failure.  Please don't rewrite the poll.  Thank you.
"Success at converting laying worker hive to queenright hive"

 

Thank you for your clarification.


         BEE HAPPY Jim 134 :)

[Duffydog]

Not quite certain I understand, but I have had no luck converting a LW hive to a queen right hive. I dump them.

[Michael Bush]

>The subject of Laying Workers seems to be yet another debatable area of beekeeping.  There appears to be two competing views: some authorities suggest that LW exist at all times, and that workers remove their eggs.  The other view is that LW will not exist until the colony becomes queenless (and thus brood-less), as the development of their ovaries is suppressed until that time.

The research is out there.  Not much to debate...

[rdy-b]

 there is much debate --however most methods include a laying queen-- or a cell
this is a good example of why newbies should start with at least two colonies
more recourse there are the easeyer to rebuild a problem hive's there are enough resources
you can repopulate the  some times simple shake out works --but what next
waxmoth eats all your -brood comb--late season queens are harder and harder to get at a fair price
sometimes a simple combin is the best--keep the bees in and the wax mothhs out--good luck you will need it  RDY-B

[Oldbeavo]

We had a hive go queenless and a worker started laying, hive full of drone brood. In looking at the frames I found a different looking bee, same size as a normal bee but with a hairless thorax like queen, maybe a little narrow or pointed in the abdomen but no longer.
I took the frame with  the "different" bee and put it in a 3 frame nuc. Five days later inspect the hive, no more eggs, most brood capped. So added frame of eggs and brood. That was yesterday.
Inspected frame in the little nuc and there is a half formed queen cell  with an egg in it, so was the "different" bee the laying worker or did I just get lucky and remove it from the hive.

[Michael Bush]

See page 9 of "The Wisdom of the Hive"

"Although worker honey bees cannot mate, they do possess ovaries and can produce viable eggs; hence they do have the potential to have male offspring (in bees and other Hymenoptera, fertilized eggs produce females while unfertilized eggs produce males). It is now clear, however, that this potential is exceedingly rarely realized as long as a colony contains a queen (in queenless colonies, workers eventually lay large numbers of male eggs; see the review in Page and Erickson 1988). One supporting piece of evidence comes from studies of worker ovary development in queenright colonies, which have consistently revealed extremely low levels of development. All studies to date report far fewer than 1 % of workers have ovaries developed sufficiently to lay eggs (reviewed in Ratnieks 1993; see also Visscher 1995a). For example, Ratnieks dissected 10,634 worker bees from 21 colonies and found that only 7 had moderately developed egg (half the size of a completed egg) and that just one had a fully developed egg in her body."

If you do the math, in a normal booming queenright hive of 100,000 bees that's 70 laying workers. In a laying worker hive it's much higher.

"More than half of the bees in laying worker colonies have developed ovaries (Sakagami 1954)..."-- Reproduction by worker honey bees (Apis mellifer L.) R.E. Page Jr and E.H. Erickson Jr. - Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology August 1988, Volume 23, Issue 2, pp 117-126

"Reproductive honey bee workers have considerable fecundity, with laying workers in queenless colonies each producing c. 19-32 eggs per day (Perepelova, 1928, cited in Ribbands, 1953). "--Evidence for a queen-produced egg-marking pheromone and its use in worker policing in the honey bee FLW Ratnieks - Journal of Apicultural Research Volume 34, Issue 1, 1995 - Taylor & Francis

http://www.bushfarms.com/beeslayingworkers.htm#multiple

[CrazyTalk]

>The subject of Laying Workers seems to be yet another debatable area of beekeeping.  There appears to be two competing views: some authorities suggest that LW exist at all times, and that workers remove their eggs.  The other view is that LW will not exist until the colony becomes queenless (and thus brood-less), as the development of their ovaries is suppressed until that time.

The research is out there.  Not much to debate...

Yup. Michael is correct here (as usual).

 It's pretty clear at this point. Typically 6% of worker bees have ovaries developed enough to produce drones, and in typical hives somewhere around 6-7% of male eggs are produced by workers, and roughly .1% of drones are the result (worker eggs are more likely to be removed).


Here's one study - there are many more.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3829896/


The problem with "laying worker" is that when the queen pheromone disappears, many more workers ovaries develop, and you can end up with a hive that has 40% of its workers laying drone eggs, and spending almost no time doing actual work. This is clearly unsustainable.

[little john]

Both Michael Bush and Acebird are portraying the presence of Laying Workers within a hive as being a perfectly normal occurrence - i.e that they are always present.  Not so.

In 'Reproductive harmony via mutual policing by workers in eusocial Hymenoptera'. (Am. Nat. 132: 217-236. Ratnieks, F. L. W., Wenseleers, T., Foster, K. R. 2006.), Ratnieks states:
"Societies typically headed by monandrous queens, such as those of the bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) and stingless bees (Meliponinae), have reproductive workers in queenright colonies; those with polyandrous queens, as in honey bees (Apis) and some yellowjacket wasps (Vespula), do not."

By "do not", he means of course 'naturally', or 'in the normal course of events' - thus the presence of Laying Workers is an aberration from the norm, and should be seen as such.

In 'Egg-laying, egg-removal, and ovary development by workers in queenright honeybee colonies'. (Ratnieks, F. L. W., Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, March 1993, Volume 32, Issue 3, pp 191?198), Ratnieks concludes, "... worker egg-laying and worker policing are both normal, though rare, in queenright honey bee colonies ..."

By 'rare' he means not in all colonies, and at all times, and when it does occur it's in very small numbers indeed. 

So - a rather more accurate summary of the Laying Worker phenomenon would be that "multiple laying workers may sometimes exist within a queenright hive, but this event is rare".

And as Laying Workers may just as easily be completely absent within a Queenright Hive, extrapolating (or 'doing the Math') to achieve a figure of 70 is just so much balony - as the figure could just as easily be zero.

LJ

[Acebird]

And as Laying Workers may just as easily be completely absent within a Queenright Hive, extrapolating (or 'doing the Math') to achieve a figure of 70 is just so much balony - as the figure could just as easily be zero.

LJ

I don't know how you arrive at "balony" not knowing the physical size of the colony and it's population.  My claim is hearsay that came from Michael Bush.  You site literature to the effect that it happens, duh.  As far as I am concerned if Michael Bush insists that it happens I will repeat his teachings as fact.  I don't need 75 more documents agreeing with him.

[Michael Bush]

>Both Michael Bush and Acebird are portraying the presence of Laying Workers within a hive as being a perfectly normal occurrence - i.e that they are always present.  Not so.

But they are.

In 'Reproductive harmony via mutual policing by workers in eusocial Hymenoptera'. (Am. Nat. 132: 217-236. Ratnieks, F. L. W., Wenseleers, T., Foster, K. R. 2006.), Ratnieks states:
"Societies typically headed by monandrous queens, such as those of the bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) and stingless bees (Meliponinae), have reproductive workers in queenright colonies; those with polyandrous queens, as in honey bees (Apis) and some yellowjacket wasps (Vespula), do not."

Many people have believed this and I'm sure you can find many people still saying it.  It does not make it so.  When someone decided to actually find out they dissected over 10,000 workers in queenright hives and came up with a very different answer.

>In 'Egg-laying, egg-removal, and ovary development by workers in queenright honeybee colonies'. (Ratnieks, F. L. W., Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, March 1993, Volume 32, Issue 3, pp 191?198), Ratnieks concludes, "... worker egg-laying and worker policing are both normal, though rare, in queenright honey bee colonies ..."

Exactly.  Laying workers in a queen right hive are normal.  Yes, they are also rare in the sense that 70 out of 10,000 of them are doing it.

>By 'rare' he means not in all colonies, and at all times, and when it does occur it's in very small numbers indeed. 

How do they know about egg policing?  Because it takes place in normal colonies. And it takes place enough to observe it.

>So - a rather more accurate summary of the Laying Worker phenomenon would be that "multiple laying workers may sometimes exist within a queenright hive, but this event is rare".

There is much study out there.  You might look into it, but from the above that I already quoted:

"All studies to date report far fewer than 1 % of workers have ovaries developed sufficiently to lay eggs (reviewed in Ratnieks 1993; see also Visscher 1995a)."

and yes <1% would be rare.  "For example, Ratnieks dissected 10,634 worker bees from 21 colonies and found that only 7 had moderately developed egg (half the size of a completed egg) and that just one had a fully developed egg in her body."

>And as Laying Workers may just as easily be completely absent within a Queenright Hive, extrapolating (or 'doing the Math') to achieve a figure of 70 is just so much balony - as the figure could just as easily be zero.

But it's not zero.  You might want to read that section of "Wisdom of the Hive" if you want Seeley's distillation of it.  You can find plenty of studies, but you obviously intend to interpret any findings a a fluke rather than the normal threshold.

[Oldbeavo]

Once a worker starts laying does she change at all physically?
The hive that had the laying worker had about 4 full depth frames of drone brood of a very uneven pattern, but a lot of it.

[Michael Bush]

>Once a worker starts laying does she change at all physically?

They are SLIGHTLY bigger, but no more so than a house bee compared to a field bee.  But I have caught them laying and they are in the larger group rather than the smaller group...

[MikeyN.C.]

I'm a newbeek, have only seen one queenless LW hive and they were laying double eggs in each cell.

[little john]

[...]  you obviously intend to interpret any findings a a fluke rather than the normal threshold.

Not at all - I don't object to the idea of Laying Workers existing at times in Q+ve colonies - it's the 'Always' claim which I'm objecting to.

7 Laying Workers (and only 1 of which had 'gone the full distance') from 21 hives - during just one experiment - and from that you're asserting that there are ALWAYS multiple laying Workers present in ALL queenright hives ...

Did all 7 come from one hive ?  Did 1 come from each of seven hives ?  And what about those hives where none were found ? 

Ratniek's wording was: " Dissections of workers revealed that about 1 worker in 10000 had a fully developed egg in her body.", when perhaps he should have said, " ... 1 worker in those 10000 ...", as otherwise he's suggesting the existence of a ratio suitable for extrapolation.  You see, he could have found a second egg in the very next bee to be examined - or - he might not have found a second egg in the next ten thousand bees.  We'll never know.  All we do know is that he found one viable egg in 10,000 bees - nothing more can be read into those figures than that. They certainly can't be extrapolated in the way that you have done.

There are many questions which remain unanswered here (due in part to limitations in experimental design) - such as "did all 21 colonies have equal brood pheromone levels ?" 
[I fully accept that as we move into autumn (fall), the level of brood rearing reduces, or even stops, and one might therefore reasonably expect to see an increase in Laying Workers at this time.  Less so - perhaps none - during spring.]

And then there is a consideration of genetic sub-group: "are all sub-groups of bees equally prone to the development of Laying Workers - especially in queenright colonies?"

Unless those kinds of questions can be satifactorily answered, and until the presence of Laying Workers in ALL hives at ALL times can be demonstrated, claims involving the word 'always' simply cannot be legitimately asserted.
LJ