Beekeepers lose hives all the time.  It is a fact of life for beekeeping – perhaps more so today than ever before.  Not everyone can afford to take extraordinary measures to preserve a hive in a death spiral.  But extraordinary measures provide plenty of opportunities for learning opportunities. This is the story of what I learned from saving a hive with egg laying workers.


Death of a Queen

March 17, 2011 – Bruce and I inspected our three hives. At some point, we either dropped the queen on the ground (she was laying so she is unable to fly) or we squooshed her (if that is not a technical term, it should be). Either case, we killed her and did not know it.

April 10, 2011 – All three hives look healthy from the outside.  Major nectar flow is just beginning. On closer inspection, we observe that hive #2 has no brood. None. It takes 21 days for a worker egg (the most prevalent kind) to grow into larvae, then pupae, and then hatch. All eggs from March 17 were already hatched. But no eggs, larvae, or capped brood. We realized that we must have killed the queen on March 17th.  Shit.

I start searching for a queen. Jennifer Berry wouldn’t have any for another month.  Don Kuchenmeister didn’t have any.  Brushy Mountain in NC suggested that I contact Spell Bee in south Georgia (I am having no luck north of Atlanta).  Spell Bee offered to sell me a bee.

April 16, 2011 – I get a call from the local United State Postal Service. They have my bee and would I please pick it up.  I run out to get it only to find a dead queen surrounded by her dead consorts. The USPS has been sitting on this box for at least 4 days.  The hive is now one month without a queen and about a week without brood.

I am getting desperate.  I call Cindy Hodges. She was at the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers Association meeting this last Wednesday and had a few unfertilized queens that she harvested from queen cells. I had told her at the meeting that I had one on order though I would not know at the time that it rotting in a post office.  Today Cindy says I can have one and I run to her house to pick it up.

Usually when you order a queen, it is a fertilized queen.  The queen has already had her way with a dozen or so lucky drones.  Lucky for them that is until she rips the male drone’s gonads out from their bodies and they die without their balls.  But I digress. Cindy’s queen had not been on a fertility flight yet so she was sure to be a virgin.  She was at least a week away from laying eggs.  And then there was the question of the queenless hive accepting her.

When I opened the hive, I observed the following:

  • there were more drones than normal
  • there was spotty drone brood
  • there was still no worker brood (drone brood is larger than worker brood)

This is all evidence of laying workers. Workers are all unfertilized females with under-developed sex organs.  Lacking the smell of brood, workers will start laying male/haploid/drone eggs – only.  Once they start doing this, they will not easily accept the introduction of a new queen. Their most likely response to the queen is a balling (click here to see balling the queen).  I did not see any eggs laid by the workers (a sure sign of laying workers).  But if I did, they would occur in twos and would be stuck to the wall of the cell because their abdomens are not as long as a queen ( who is able to lay a single egg in the center bottom of the cell). Healthy queens lay eggs in rather solid patterns whereas laying workers lay eggs in a spotty pattern.

Honey Bee Separation Anxiety

A hive with laying workers is in a death spiral because it can never produce workers and is unlikely to accept queens.   I researched several options and most writers seem to recommend merging the hive with another healthy hive.  I viewed that as giving up on the hive.  This was a very healthy hive and I wanted very much to save it.

To make a hive with laying workers queenright, the following condition needs to exist:

  • A colony that can accept a new queen – this suggests a hive with all nurse bees/laying workers removed
  • A colony that discourages workers from laying – this can be solved by inserting a frame full of brood from another hive.

So I loaded the #2 hive into a wheel barrow and trucked it more than 100 yards away to my front yard, shook the bees out on to the lawn. They did not like that. I then trucked the mostly empty hive back to where it came from for the foragers to find it.  Then I introduced a queen and a frame of brood. What was left on my lawn were about 2-3 pounds of angry nurse bees that had never been outside of their hive. They did not know where their hive was. The older foragers did know where their hive was and found it quickly.  The frame of foreign brood would hatch in time and provide nurse bees for the foreign queen.

Within about 6 hours, the nurse bees formed a queen-less cluster on the branch of a small tree in the front yard.

April 18, 2011 – Yesterday and today, I observed no dead pupae on the landing board – a good sign.  In addition, the fondant plug is half eaten and the bees surrounding the queen’s cage appear to be feeding her – not biting her – another good sign.

May 8, 2011 – I ended up with 3 stings from the adventure three weeks ago but today I was rewarded with frames of beautiful brood and eggs.  Bruce pulled up a medium frame located over the space in the hive body where the queen cell was located…and the bees had extended comb down into the vacant space.

It is now 3 weeks since I shook the bees out in the front yard and that cluster of egg-laying workers is still there, though their numbers have dwindled.  It has rained several times and still they do not seek shelter.  Without a queen, they have no future.

You can view the progress of Hive #2 by visiting the interactive Apiary Timeline (click here). You can calculate the actual cost of removing the nurse bees:  a little more than 2 pounds of bees – I figure 8,000-12,000 bees or 13-18% of the hive.  Since April 16th, the hive has gained about 5 pounds – I would guess most of that is tulip poplar nectar gathered by surviving foragers.

Update May 22, 2011 –  About 5 weeks after dumping the entire hive unceremoniously onto my front yard, the cluster of laying workers are gone except for 4-6.   The photo shows their unprotected comb.

Update May 25, 2011 – The single best source of information I found on egg-laying workers can be viewed by Clicking Here.  Khalil Hamdan of Apeldoorn has written a lot of really fine articles on beekeeping and is currently working on a book. He has graciously allowed me to include his article here.