possible method to stop laying workers??

[Chef Isaac]

I was thinking today (very rare) that if you have a hive that goes queenless and you catch it in time, is it possible to put a swarm lure in the hive thinking that that lure acts as the scent of a queen which might stop laying workers?

[clintonbemrose]

Never tried that one! The laying workers would go crazy looking for the queen though. (SMILE)
Clint

[Dick Allen]

This comes from an article by Mark Winston and Keith Slessor on Queen Pheromone in the July-August 1992 ‘American Scientist’. The article was given as a handout in one of the beekeeping short courses.

“....some combination of pheromones secreted by the queen and the brood inhibits the maturation of the worker’s ovaries, which usually remain small and nonfunctional. Nevertheless, even in queenright colonies a few workers manage to lay eggs and many workers begin egg-laying two or three weeks after the queen and brood are removed.

The ovary-suppressing substances produced by the queen was thought to be mandibular pheromone, particularly 9ODA. To test this hypothesis, we removed queens from groups of colonies and applied various doses of mandibular pheromone to the colonies for the next 43 days. Some colonies received daily doses as high as 10 Qeq [Qeq is defined as the average amount of pheromone found in the glands of a mated queen]. To our surprise, workers in queenless, pheromone-treated colonies developed ovaries at the same rate as workers in queenless, pheromone-free colonies. Apparently queen mandibular pheromone is not involved in the suppression of worker ovary development.”

[Michael Bush]

Also, the swarm lures are generally imitation Nasonov pheromone, not queen pheromones. "Bee Boost" is QMP and is not sold as a swarm lure, although I've used small pieces of it with some Nasonov in addition with good luck.

[Jim Fischer]

While a QMP tube will simulate a queen, and keep
the bees calm during the wait for a new queen,
the impact on laying workers may be limited, if
any impact results at all.

Here's the problem - laying worker's eggs are
"policed" by "loyal" workers (removed and eaten)
to keep this activity under control.

But if there are no queen-laid eggs due to a
lack of a laying queen, I'm not sure that the
typical behavior can be expected, as there
would be no eggs to be "normal" eggs that would
smell strongly of the queen ("Smells Like Team Spirit"?)
to contrast with the laying worker's eggs, and
provide a basis for detecting a "bogus" egg.

Here's some good papers on the subject:
http://biology.plosjournals.org/archive/1545-7885/2/9/pdf/10.1371_journal.pbio.0020248-S.pdf
http://biology.plosjournals.org/archive/1545-7885/2/9/pdf/10.1371_journal.pbio.0020324-S.pdf

[dickm]

I read somewhere lately that the smell of brood will inhibit laying workers.

dickm