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Laying Workers-They don't read the same books we do!

6K views 52 replies 17 participants last post by  Michael Bush 
#1 ·
I have read in a lot of literature that if you have a LW hive, one course of action is to take the hive a long distance away, shake/blow it out and the laying workers cannot/will not fly back to the original hive. In my case, I don't think my bees have been reading the same literature I've been reading.

Background

5/27. Found laying worker cells in honey supers as well as main hive boxes. (Photo laywork1.). Loaded entire hive on to my UTV. Took a very strong 2 box 5 frame NUC and put in 10 frame box. Saw queen as making the transfer and NUC had several frames of capped brood as well as two frames of eggs and emerging brood. Took former 2 box, 5 frame but now 10 frame one box NUC and moved into location of LW hive. Drove several hundred yards away and blew/brushed/shook out 1 super and 3 hive boxes of LW hive. Took 10 frames with most drone brood, double eggs etc and put in separate hive box (Put in my freezer later). Reinspected remaining LW frames and frames in honey super to insure no bees present and drove back to apiary. Put two remaining hive bodies on top of newly formed 10 frame hive box from 2/5 NUC, put queen excluder on top of third box and put original honey super back on.

6/2. Open up hive and found throughout the hive what is in laywork2 photo. Additionally, the population of the hive was diminished somewhat since 5/27. I am guessing because all the house bees weren't oriented and therefore couldn't make it back to the hive. Worse yet, although I searched through each frame twice, I did not see the queen from the original NUC. However, the frames that had eggs and emerging brood on them on 5/27 from the NUC hive are now mostly capped and I did not see any queen cells of any kind.

At least from my experiences, shaking/blowing out a LW hive with the expectation that laying workers can't/won't fly back to the original hive is not an absolute. Now, if I could just get them to read my bee library.....
 

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#37 ·
I really do not get past the "move the hive??? ft part". If I'm moving a bee, it is to where I want to put it.
Shake them out? Way to much effort and thoroughly unpleasant for me and I expect the bees.

Why do you only find LWs on the hottest, most humid days?
 
#39 · (Edited)
It so happened I needed to finally terminate the over-wintered hive that went LW.
I need the hive back into rotation.
This was yesterday.

To my surprise the colony was still alive - not a clue how old these bees are.
I was hoping the hive was empty - no, it was not.

First, I pulled all the frames and set them next to a trap hive (about 10 meters away from the home site).
NO shaking.
I was hoping the bees will stay on the frames as I needed to immediately paint the hive and reuse it for a fresh swarm waiting by.
Well, the bees promptly absconded the frames and returned to the home site.
Honeycomb Apiary Bee Honey Insect

Clearly, the laying females flew home too.
These emptied frames were recycled into the fresh swarm shortly after.

Second, in the place of the removed hive I placed objects from the hive that "smell like home".
I used follower boards.
This way the returning bees could latch onto something for a time and stay put (so I thought).
And they did - latch on, temporarily.
Clearly, homeless bees want to latch onto some object (ideally, smelling like home).
Bee Honeybee Insect Beehive Membrane-winged insect

I did this so the bees did not invade the nearby trap with the fresh swarm (visible on the picture, standing behind the follower boards)
Was not a big risk since the swarm is very strong - but rather an experiment.

Third, I started painting the hive, about 5 meters away from its original site.
As I was working, the LW bees swarmed the hive.
So I ended up painting the hive, while shaking the bees out of it and smoking them and calling them some names.
And managed to get the job done.
Bee Insect Honeybee Plant community Apiary


Fourth, by the time I was done with the painting, the hive was largely empty of the bees.
Why?
Because they swarmed into my tool backpack.
The backpack has scrapes of propolis and wax and some old LGO scent lures and all kinds of bee trash.
So they move into it.
Bee Honeybee Beehive Membrane-winged insect Plant pathology

Tree Plant Nepenthes


While the LWs stayed in the backpack, I was able to home the fresh swarm into the newly painted hive.
Finally, I shook the contents of the backpack, bees and the tools out by the log hive trap (mentioned above).
Splattered some honey and some LGO onto the log hive.
Smoked the backpack. Shook it out few times, repeatedly.
Got the LWs latch onto the log hive and left them there to fend for themselves.

End of story.

Doing all of the above demonstrated how:
- initially the LW colony in its entirety and quickly returned to the home site where they found no livable hive on the site
-- the frames with some drone brood did not hold them in place as I was hoping
-- clearly, the laying females did not stay on the frames either (the real queen would have held the bees on the frames; at least some)
- then they started orienting themselves by the smell
-- first they found their own hive I was already painting few meters away
-- then they latched onto my backpack (mostly due to its LGO fumes I think)
- this entire affair took about 2-3 hours within the radios of 10 meters of the original LW homesite
- the LWs regrouped several times purely by smell on a variety of random objects by fanning Nasonov (at one time they even collected onto my going smoker)

As the above was taking place, I am sure some of these LWs started begging into active colonies standing near as well.
It was observable.
 
#40 ·
Greg,
Wish I was there to watch. Best laid plans!

Next time, and I hope there is no next time for you, try placing a frame of brood with bees into another hive. Really not much more reaction than a frame from a QR hive. I believe there is a number of frames where that reaction changes, what that number is I do not know.

Bees regularly tolerate a LWs. I do not know what they consider them to be, but it is something far less as a threat than a true queen.
 
#41 · (Edited)
If this LW colony was valuable (young bees), I'd consider other moves, maybe.
But these old bees were useless to me and I needed the hive back ASAP.
Figured I'd do some experimentation while at it.
:)

Pretty sure, any worthy workers still found their way into the active colonies.
And for sure, the drones did - the most value what left of the LWs.
 
#43 ·
I have never heard the expression 3 feet or 3 miles, it was always 2 feet or 2 miles.

A hive can be moved 2 feet to the side, front or rear and the bees fly to the entrance with no hesitancy, when they reach visual distance of the hive it is still within their "memorized location." Two miles is believed to be the area that foragers have flown in search of food sources and have "memorized." Therefore it is believed that for a forager to reorient on a "home location" they must be removed further away so they do not recognize landmarks and return to their previous home.

In a previous post LJ asked how far wind would carry scent. Here in the U.S. any country boy that hunts deer could tell him that it is hundreds of yards. The proper question would be "how good is a honey bee's ability to smell?" The honey bee uses smell to locate nectar sources when searching it's forage area, so it should be excellent.

When a honey bee begins a search for it's colony when the colony is moved, or when bees are removed and shaken out, they fly circular search patterns. In the case of shaking laying workers 30 or 50 feet away from a hive, in very few circles a bee is in the "down wind" area.

A young honey bee first flies at 6 days from emerging, this is to take a dump and to orient on the hive entrance. If all brood has emerged a week before laying workers take control of the colony most or all bees would have oriented on the hive entrance.

I have found joining a LW colony using the newspaper method works, the big question is the LW colony still in a condition to benefit the colony being joined to it. What is the varroa load and the virus load in a substandard colony? Is it worth saving?
 
#44 ·
I have found joining a LW colony using the newspaper method works, the big question is the LW colony still in a condition to benefit the colony being joined to it.
Therein the conundrum.

Almost always when I have joined a LW hive to a normal one, if i take a look 2 or 3 weeks later almost no benefit from those extra bees can be seen. Also, on the few occasions when I have been able to "fix" a LW hive, the strength of the colony takes a big dive once they start raising brood. I think it's because bees in LW hives tend to be mostly old, and stressed, and they go downhill quickly once they start feeding brood.

As beekeepers we naturally feel some affinity with our bees and don't like seeing them suffer, and most people are also averse to waste, hence the usual desire to attempt to save the bees in LW colonies. But wether it results in much benefit is up for debate.
 
#47 ·
I think we are quibbling about the significance of wind direction. Local eddies around buildings, trees, ground contours etc., mystify general wind direction. I see this when trying to stay upwind of OA vapor and also when flying small low stall speed model planes.

I think the gist of the issue is not whether you can manage to combine or convert laying workers but rather if it has anything more than entertainment value in the big picture. Like the riding of a unicycle.:rolleyes:
 
#48 ·
I had a similar experience with a late year swarm I caught in September. In my situation I found the queen when I put them into 10 frame box, went out a week later no eggs and couldn't find the queen. Went out second week and no queen and laying workers, so the queen must not of made it back from her mating flight. What I did to make the colony queen right was take their box and moved it about 15' away, placed new box with one frame of brood, larva and eggs and filled the remainder of the box with new frames. The box was placed in the original location. I then shook all the bees off of the frames and set them aside to put in the freezer later. Then placed a caged queen on the frame with brood. Went out a couple of days later and the colony was queen right and she was laying. Not sure if this was the proper way to correct for laying workers, but it certainly worked for me.
 
#50 ·
Such things do happen.

One time I found a LW hive, then a few hives down I found a hive with 2 queens, an old marked one, and a young supersedure. So, nothing to lose, I took the old queen, blew heaps of smoke in the entrance of the LW hive, and put the old queen on the landing board and she went in. At next inspection she had been accepted and was laying. It was fall, and she managed to get that hive through winter.

So what I think is that very occasionally, we may get lucky and requeen a LW hive. But probably 99% of the time, they will reject the queen. So if dealing with a LW hive we have to consider the balance of probabilities, especially if we are paying money for a queen, not likely to be a good investment.
 
#51 ·
Trying to save a LW hive weakened my other hives to the point where they all died over the winter. And I tried everything listed. The only thing that worked was to put a nuk on top of them separated by a wire screen. When i combined them it worked but there were so many drones the workers couldn’t get rid of them. All the brood frames I kept adding from my other hives weakened them. Lesson learned, if I I ever get a LW hive I will add ONE frame of eggs and buy a queen cell for them. After that they are on their own.
 
#52 ·
http://www.bushfarms.com/beeslayingworkers.htm

Your problem is that most books don't have anything about laying workers in them that is true...

All of the bees know their way back.

Half of the bees in the laying worker hive that has dozens of eggs in each cell are laying workers.

It is the lack of brood pheromones that is the cause. See the above link.
 
#53 ·

"More than half of the bees in laying worker colonies have developed ovaries (Sakagami 1954)..."-- Reproduction by worker honey bees (Apis mellifer L.) R.E. Page Jr and E.H. Erickson Jr. - Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology August 1988, Volume 23, Issue 2, pp 117-126


If all the bees seem to be returning that would be pretty good proof that the laying workers know how to get home... If half of them were confused on the ground, then you might have evidence that they don't know their way back.
 
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