Laying worker mitigation measures

Push-in introduction cages, work best, when there is emerging worker brood inside the cage with the new queen, and perhaps a little nectar and pollen (beebread). The newly emerging workers will immediately adopt the queen, as theirs, and begin taking care of her. It helps if there are cells of food in there also, so they can all get to food without having to rely on the hive bees to provide it for them - they may be too slow to do this.

It will likely work, but sure sounds like a complicated way to do it. In reading your plan, I wasn't sure which you were placing atop, I would recommend placing the suspected laying worker colony above the queenright colony - so brood pheromones can be drawn up as the warm air rises from the healthy brood nest.

Laying workers aren't rare, nearly all colonies have some laying workers present. They only rarely become a problem, when a colony has been broodless for an extended period of time (the presence of the normal worker brood and their associated brood hormones keep the nurse bees on-track, removing laying worker eggs from worker cells).

Discovered no laying workers, but here is a new twist to the plot:
Today I did another inspection and found the virgin queen laying in the hive's cellar! I began inspecting frame by frame and all the brood frames were getting filled with nectar, but not yet capped. There was no brood or eggs anywhere. After I began pulling frames from the bottom box, looking down at the hive's IPM floor, I noticed burr comb beneath the No. 8 hardware cloth. :scratch: When I performed a previous inspection and replaced the bottom brood box, removable shims used to block the access to the oil tray shifted and a gap was formed. :doh: In other words, after the virgin queen mated, she returned to the hive, but entered the space beneath the hive where the oil tray sits beneath the screened bottom board. There was burr comb above and beneath the tray with single eggs in the cells: a new brood box. That caused the two 8 frame brood boxes above to become supers and the bees began putting nectar into the brood cells in those two boxes. There was also more than a 3 lb. package of bees under the screened floor too! The hive is congested with old workers.
Considering all the workers are old, can I still do a walk away split by introducing the mail order queen, if I place her and the burr comb with eggs under a push-in cage?
Thank you for reading,
Terk

>Therefore, I ordered a queen which shall arrive tomorrow and have been waiting for a virgin queen to return to the hive.

Which one do you want?

>Due to work, there have been no inspections, until tomorrow, and I'll need to know what to do, if I have the rare case of laying workers. (I always get rare cases of everything, and so why not laying workers for good measure ).

Far from rare, as Joseph said...

> If I find multiple eggs per cell it will be time to shake them out.

No. http://bushfarms.com/beesfallacies.htm#doubleeggs

>Then I want to place the mail order queen with her attendants, in a push-in cage of a design that bees cannot chew under to get to the queen.

Not sure I understand. A "push-in cage" can always be chewed under. No one ships queens in one.

http://www.bushfarms.com/beesfaqs.htm#pushincage
http://www.bushfarms.com/beesqueenrearingsimplified.htm#pushincage
http://www.bushfarms.com/images/QueenConfinement5.jpg
http://www.bushfarms.com/beesdoolittle.htm#ValuableQueen

>Also, I have a hive of package bees that I want to temporarily combine with the laying worker hive, but they are in a ktbh hive. The ktbh hive looks like a Langstroth hive on the outside, but holds 19" top bars on the inside, and has 60 degree walls. Therefore the Langstroth and ktbh hives can be stacked seamlessly. The bee package was comprised of several races of bees, but after four days in the ktbh hive, only Italians remained, a fraction of the original package.

First, do you know you have laying workers? Second, it's very unlikely that only the dark bees left and only the yellow bees stayed. Maybe you should analyze things more carefully and figure out what is happening.

>The first generation of newborn brood has not yet occurred and I do not want to risk losing the entire package of bees by doing a complete combine. Instead I would want to temporarily combine the two hives, yet have them separated by a double screen board, so that the laying worker hive will be exposed to brood and queen pheromones, yet not have physical contact with the package bees. If that is a good idea, does it matter whether the laying worker hive is on top or on the bottom of the laying worker hive?

All that matters is the brood pheromones...

>Please note that there will then be two queens in the hive, one in the kthb, and the other in a push-in cage attached to a frame in the laying worker hive.

OK.

>Finally, I'd like to add Nasonov pheromone and lemon grass oil to the combine.

For what purpose?

>Would doing that, improve the chances of the laying workers accepting the queen?

Not really. I never expect laying workers to accept a queen. They usually do not no matter what I do... a queen cell is more useful and has more hope...

http://www.bushfarms.com/beeslayingworkers.htm

After a month, my hive has recovered and there is now emerging brood. However, I still had that pre-mated queen and yesterday I placed her under a push in cage on a frame of emerging brood. After 1/2 hour, she had 6 newborn attendants with more on the way. I made sure all of the bees were swept down to the lower box before I placed a queen excluder between the two brood boxes. There are no supers on the hive because I only had one queen excluder handy. I did not use any newspaper for the bees to chew through. Do the chances of queen acceptance look good considering that new bees are being born fast and the old bees are slowly dying out? Should I just keep the second queen their and wait and see what happens? After all, the hive will continue to grow in numbers and the loss, if any, will be the second queen.