Signs of Laying Worker Bees

Signs of laying workers: The pink circle shows multiple eggs laid in cells. The green circle shows more than 1 larva per cell.

Bees. They are endlessly fascinating. Recent case in point: Discovering signs of laying workers.  Allow me to explain.

Going into last winter, I had a big, booming hive. It appeared to be doing well throughout the cold winter months and into Spring, but when I was finally able to perform a hive inspection on a 55+ degree April day, I couldn’t find the queen. That wasn’t necessarily unusual. She was typically hard to find anyway.  But it was troubling as I couldn’t see any brood either.  I took lots of photos of the frames to review later, and sure enough, I discovered what was going on. The photos revealed multiple eggs and larva in scattered cells and along the edges of frames – something a queen bee would never do.  Somehow, this hive had become hopelessly queenless. Meaning, the queen had died before resuming egg-laying in the Spring, and sensing this, some number of worker bees had developed ovaries to try and fill the void.  The problem is they really can’t.  Laying workers cannot produce more worker bees or produce a new queen without queen-laid eggs. They can only produce drones as they are unfertilized. This hive, therefore, was doomed.

What an extraordinary response to an imminent hive collapse.  Producing drones that would at least have the possibility of carrying on the line through mating with another hive’s queen.  I find that fascinating, don’t you?

The good news is that, if caught early enough, a laying worker situation can be reversed, and the hive saved. More on that in the next post, here.