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As most people are aware, there are basically 3 established ways of dealing with Laying Workers:
1. Shaking out. This appears to work ok if the colony has only recently turned L/W. However, I can now confirm what others have said - that with a chronic L/W colony, the lion's share of the bees will simply return home.
2. With the above in mind - shaking-out with removal of the hive. This renders the bees homeless, so they will then have to beg admission into adjacent hives. Any bee presenting as a Queen (L/W, D/L) will be denied entry.
3. Providing the colony with frames of open brood for 2 weeks or more.
Some two months ago I tried DR virgin introduction into a batch of nucs which resulted in about a 50% success rate, which eventually left me with a number of nuc-sized L/W colonies in addition to 2 full-sized colonies which came out of winter as L/W, and which I allowed to remain in that state for experimentation.
I tried combining the first of these full-sized colonies by placing it over a strong queenright colony with wire mesh in-between the boxes. After 2 weeks the L/W colony was inspected only to find that many eggs were present, as well as numerous open and capped worker-drone cells. Despite this, the mesh was removed and subsequent inspections have confirmed that the combined colony has remained queenright.
A different approach was chosen for the second full-sized L/W colony. On the basis that foreign queens (or any bee resembling a foreign queen) will be instantly killed whenever they're detected by workers, this colony was placed over another powerful queenright colony (on 22 deep frames) with a Q/X between them.
Because the weather closed in, I was unable to inspect the results of this procedure for 8 days. But upon inspection of the 11-frame L/W box, no eggs were seen, (so presumably the L/W's had been killed), and the contents of both open and capped worker-drone cells had been destroyed and the cells cleaned-out.
Following this, two 5-frame L/W nucleus colonies were placed over the same full-sized queenright colony, and inspected after 5 days - with exactly the same result.
Two more 5-frame L/W nucleus colonies had been placed over a third full-sized queenright colony at the same time, but the results there were slightly different, in that capped worker-drone cells had remained intact, whereas eggs and open worker-drone cells had been destroyed - so it appears possible that there may be some genetic response-variation involved, as the two queenright colonies involved were of different strains.
This procedure was further repeated (using the same queenright colonies with identical results) until I ran out of L/W colonies - the last pair were inspected, removed, and combined this morning.
In all cases there was a significant reduction in the number of bees within the L/W colony box, however there appears to be no obvious way of knowing whether this is due to the number of bees killed, or whether this was simply due to bees in that box having swelled the ranks of the queenright section - for during these crude 'experiments' no attempt was made to assess the populations of the queenright colonies, before and after each procedure.
LJ
1. Shaking out. This appears to work ok if the colony has only recently turned L/W. However, I can now confirm what others have said - that with a chronic L/W colony, the lion's share of the bees will simply return home.
2. With the above in mind - shaking-out with removal of the hive. This renders the bees homeless, so they will then have to beg admission into adjacent hives. Any bee presenting as a Queen (L/W, D/L) will be denied entry.
3. Providing the colony with frames of open brood for 2 weeks or more.
Some two months ago I tried DR virgin introduction into a batch of nucs which resulted in about a 50% success rate, which eventually left me with a number of nuc-sized L/W colonies in addition to 2 full-sized colonies which came out of winter as L/W, and which I allowed to remain in that state for experimentation.
I tried combining the first of these full-sized colonies by placing it over a strong queenright colony with wire mesh in-between the boxes. After 2 weeks the L/W colony was inspected only to find that many eggs were present, as well as numerous open and capped worker-drone cells. Despite this, the mesh was removed and subsequent inspections have confirmed that the combined colony has remained queenright.
A different approach was chosen for the second full-sized L/W colony. On the basis that foreign queens (or any bee resembling a foreign queen) will be instantly killed whenever they're detected by workers, this colony was placed over another powerful queenright colony (on 22 deep frames) with a Q/X between them.
Because the weather closed in, I was unable to inspect the results of this procedure for 8 days. But upon inspection of the 11-frame L/W box, no eggs were seen, (so presumably the L/W's had been killed), and the contents of both open and capped worker-drone cells had been destroyed and the cells cleaned-out.
Following this, two 5-frame L/W nucleus colonies were placed over the same full-sized queenright colony, and inspected after 5 days - with exactly the same result.
Two more 5-frame L/W nucleus colonies had been placed over a third full-sized queenright colony at the same time, but the results there were slightly different, in that capped worker-drone cells had remained intact, whereas eggs and open worker-drone cells had been destroyed - so it appears possible that there may be some genetic response-variation involved, as the two queenright colonies involved were of different strains.
This procedure was further repeated (using the same queenright colonies with identical results) until I ran out of L/W colonies - the last pair were inspected, removed, and combined this morning.
In all cases there was a significant reduction in the number of bees within the L/W colony box, however there appears to be no obvious way of knowing whether this is due to the number of bees killed, or whether this was simply due to bees in that box having swelled the ranks of the queenright section - for during these crude 'experiments' no attempt was made to assess the populations of the queenright colonies, before and after each procedure.
LJ
