Queen given to laying workers

**Rick 1456** · 05-18-2012, 11:06 AM

I put the new hive next to the LW and put the cone on the LW. The returning bees, usually with bounty, are allowed in the new hive. By the time attrition level has been reached and I dump them, not very many bees and a lot drones.

**Buzzingwithapis** · 05-18-2012, 03:02 PM

Okay mountainbee, many will disagree with my method, but its best by the level of laying workers in which you described. Scatter brood and bees among several other colonies, perhaps 1 or 2 frames in each. From each of these same colonies take a frame or 2 of brood with and adhering bees and put them into the laying worker hive. The original bees of this hive which have been scattered into several hives will for the most part return; but the laying worker or workers will remain and in all probability be destroyed. Of course the colonies that have been robbed of good brood will suffer some what; another plan which I will never condone is discarding them. They will proceed to clean up the combs ; and if they do not need the drones they will destroy them.

**Rick 1456** · 05-18-2012, 04:06 PM

Bwthapis,
Your technique has merit. It is all about breaking the LW "dynasty" MHO is it is gang warfare. In many cases, as I have read, there could be multiple Lw. It is almost like having multiple queens co existing. I have no data, just "seems" that way. A force that is under estimated when dealing with this situation. IMHO

**lcl** · 05-22-2012, 11:20 AM

[QUOTE=Michael Bush;799242]>Does it make a difference if the laying workers just started laying or if they have been at it for a long time?

Once they are laying I haven't seen any difference in their acceptance of a queen. They kill her pretty consistently. As far as how long they need open brood to suppress them it might take less if they just started.

Indeed, they got rid of the new queen and I am a bit wiser now

Switching to the open brood method to see if that does the trick. If this was not the strongest hive, I would have shaken them out and close their hive down...

**lcl** · 06-29-2012, 03:43 PM

I thought I'd post an update to my LW hive experiment. After a failed attempt of introducing a new queen to the LW hive, I followed Michael's advice and used the open brood frame swap method. I put 3 open brood frames at about 7 days intervals and by the end of the 3rd week there were no new LW eggs in the hive. I was fortunate enough to find a frame with some swarm queen cells in another hive just about the time the LW hive seemed to have "calmed" down. A couple of weeks later I can report that they have accepted one of the queens that hatched and she is now laying.

In conclusion:
1. The ex-LW hive is currently behind by about 6 weeks and it will be another 3 weeks before the new batch of worker bees are going to start hatching.
2. While the hive is now somewhat back to normal, there are still a bunch of drones that seem to deplete the honey stores. It would have been probably a whole lot worse had I not gotten "involved". I froze some of the frames that were packed with drone brood and then returned them to the hive where the open brood frames were removed from. I also scrapped some the capped drone cells from the heavily loaded frames.
3. The 4 frames I transferred from the other hives sure helped with maintaining the number of worker bees at a decent level in the LW hive.
4. Varroa Mites seem to love the LW hive as I started to notice several of them in the capped drone cells.
5. I am not sure if the LW drones are sterile or not, but if the latter is true, I sure hope that the new queen was smarter than to mate with those tiny drones

Thank you Michael for your advice. It worked!

lcl

**Goldprospector** · 06-29-2012, 07:53 PM

If you have the resources...Drawn comb, Double HB's more than one super of honey, ect. You could split the hive if you think they would have time to build up before any cold weather ect. I don't know your area.

I had a hive a couple of weeks ago that had a drone laying queen...Anyway, I had a ton of drones in the hive depleting resources...So I did a 50/50 split, added a new queen to one of the splits, (the hive had raised their own and killed or expelled the DL)
Both hives are now really full of brood, so it wont be long that there will be double the amount of workers who can try to keep up with the drone appetites.