[crofter]

I had a small split that apparently lost the queen on mating. I gave her a few more days and put in a test frame with brood. They started cells and about the same time some multiple eggs per cell. In about three days the egg laying stopped and I noticed cells being capped with bullet nosed caps. I think I caught the laying workers as they were just getting started since the one frame of brood seems to have put them right.

Would a well established laying worker colony fail to start cells on a test frame? sometimes; always; never?

It is a bit late in the season to mate a queen; should emerge Sunday 10 aug. but I have other strong colonies to donate brood and capped stores.

I took a couple of pics to silhouette the bullet nose drone cells and comparison to the proper capped worker cells on the donated comb with the emergency queen cells.

 

[kilocharlie]

Cool to see you got those queen cells, Crofter. Hope the drones make it to the party. Best of luck!

 

[Gray Goose]

at this point let it ride
not seeing drones kicked out yet, should be a warm week, was just a full moon.

mentally start collecting the donations , could even add a few frames pre hatch.
then let her alone for 3 is weeks.

if you have the resources give her a go


GG

 

[Oldtimer]

Would a well established laying worker colony fail to start cells on a test frame? sometimes; always; never?

That is an interesting question, and possibly one of those less understood questions in beekeeping.

As an ex commercial queen breeder I have seen this scenario in action often enough to form an opinion on it. When we caged queens there was always a percent of nucs that the queen had failed. There were also nucs that had picked up extra bees and were full of brood, this brood had to be removed to prevent the nuc attempting to swarm with our next queen, and this brood was re distributed to the poor ones and the failed matings, some of which already had LW'ers.

Just as LW hives will build queen cells from drone brood, they will also sometimes build them from introduced worker larvae. But only very much of a minority of the time. Another thing that puzzled me was we would sometimes find LW nucs that had been given brood, would build the queen cells from the LW eggs and not the fertilized eggs given them.

I could only put these behaviors down to the fact that in the wild, if a colony did become laying worker, it was doomed. So genetic knowledge of how to deal with the problem has not been handed down. Bees in this situation are in unchartered territory, and can behave in ways that to us seem stupid.

 

[kilocharlie]

Thank you for the reply, OT !!! That is a good snippet of information to tuck away in my head for next time I see such a situation.