Dealing with Laying Workers

There may be those who feel a queen can be offered to a laying worker colony, but from experience they colony will more often than not simply kill the queen offered. They will also try to raise queen cells, but these cells are hopeless as they are being raised from drone larvae. These cells are also known as ‘king cells’ they will never develop into a queen as importantly drone eggs only have half the number of chromosomes.

How to deal with laying workers

The only option with a laying worker colony is to shake the colony out. Ideally around 200 yards from the original hive site, but closer will also work. The best time of day to do this is in the evening.

The laying workers (who don’t fly) will be left to perish in the grass, whereas the non laying workers will fly back to the original hive stand.

If the colony was strong enough then the flying bees may then support a new queen introduced to them, but in reality if the colony was small anyway (covering less than 8 full seams of bees) then it may be best to let the bees disband into other hives in the apiary.

If you are planning to introduce a queen, it is important to make sure non of the laying worker brood goes back into the hive, the colony should be fed, and ideally some drawn comb provided for the queen to start laying in straight away.

As with anything with beekeeping there are often many ways to do things. The above is gleaned from our own experience, albeit nowadays we see very few laying worker colonies as colonies only tend to go to laying workers if they have been queenless for quite some time.

It is also worth noting that queen introduction success is always lower when trying to get a colony that has had laying workers to accept. If the laying worker brood is present then rejection is almost guaranteed as brood pheremone is present.

You must shake out all the bees away from the hive and remove the laying worker brood (replacing with drawn comb or worst case foundation). All the non-laying worker bees will fly back to the hive where you can then install your new queen as per normal procedures for introducing a queen via a queen introduction cage, candy end down, in the centre of the brood box/ nest between the top bars of the frame having removed the cap off the fondant end of the cage to allow the bees to eat through the fondant to release the queen.

But even after all this the chances of successfully introduction a mated queen into a laying worker colony is slim. The bees will be much older than in a colony without laying workers and unable to fully adequately support a new queen to expand in an efficient way. If introduction is successful you will also note a drop in bee numbers for a number of weeks after introduction as the old workers die off, and the new queens brood emerges (which will take at least 21 days from when the new queen starts laying) 

If after reading this you still feel you’d like to try introduce a queen to a laying worker colony please see our queen section of the shop for latest availability.