Laying Worker in a Top Bar Hive

[rschristies828]

I captured a swarm and put it into a brand new top bar hive I built. I thought I had the queen, because the bees settled in nicely and started to draw out comb. I have checked off and on, and today I was able to confirm that I have a laying worker. Multiple eggs per cell, and all drone comb. So either my queen died, or etc. How do I deal with a laying worker in a top bar hive?

[gmcharlie]

I captured a swarm and put it into a brand new top bar hive I built. I thought I had the queen, because the bees settled in nicely and started to draw out comb. I have checked off and on, and today I was able to confirm that I have a laying worker. Multiple eggs per cell, and all drone comb. So either my queen died, or etc. How do I deal with a laying worker in a top bar hive?


Just get a good queen and do a normal install they will clean up the mess and boot the laying worker

[Rick 1456]

In my experience in dealing with laying workers, that has an extremely low success rate. Do a search here. Lots of ways to deal with LW.

[Oldtimer]

Do you have more than one hive? If so you can put brood into the LW hive to suppress the laying workers before attempting to requeen.

There's plenty of stuff here about how to requeen a LW hive but just incase you cannot find it, the basics are that the pheremones from normal brood will suppress the laying workers. This is not instant you may need to put young brood in once a week for 3 weeks before the laying workers are suppressed, after which you can safely introduce a caged queen, or alternatively let them make their own queen, which often has around a 75% mating success rate.

If you search the forum you'll get a lot more info about how to requeen a LW hive so no point writing heaps on it here. It will mostly be about langs, but bees are bees you treat you TBH exactly the same.

[rschristies828]

Do you have more than one hive? If so you can put brood into the LW hive to suppress the laying workers before attempting to requeen.

There's plenty of stuff here about how to requeen a LW hive but just incase you cannot find it, the basics are that the pheremones from normal brood will suppress the laying workers. This is not instant you may need to put young brood in once a week for 3 weeks before the laying workers are suppressed, after which you can safely introduce a caged queen, or alternatively let them make their own queen, which often has around a 75% mating success rate.

Thank you very much for the help. I do have another top bar hive that is a package that I started, so I can borrow some brood from that hive. In all the literature I have read, it seems that LW are a very hard situation to get queen right again, so thanks for the advice. I will search the forum and get all the advice before proceeding. No need in just putting in a Queen to have her killed.