Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
When this problem occurs, the pheromonal imbalance in the colony - especially the
lack of queen pheromone and open-brood pheromone - causes the ovaries of some of
the workers to enlarge and so they start to lay eggs. Not being able to mate, the workers
can lay only drone eggs, and this they do in worker cells. The resulting drones are small
and useless, and the colony is doomed. Small, isolated drone cells made out of worker
cells are, therefore, another sign that there are problems in the colony (see Photograph
3 in the colour photograph section of this topic). Quite a few workers may be at this
game, and they compete with each other, resulting in many eggs laid in single cells. A
worker's abdomen is not as long as that of the queen, and so she can lay the egg only
part way down the cell (see Photograph 4 in the colour photograph section of this
book). Other workers may remove many of these eggs because they don't recognize
them as queen eggs. The brood pattern, therefore, is always very spotty and uneven,
with empty cells scattered among the small, domed drone cells.
The easily visible symptoms of laying workers, therefore, include the following:
Spotty and uneven brood.
Small drone brood only present.
The number of eggs per cell.
Egg position.
Drone brood in worker cells.
Removing laying workers is difficult because they look the same as other workers and
because there will probably be quite a few of them. Introducing a new queen to a hive
with laying workers is, however, often a waste of money: the colony considers itself
queen-right and will not accept the new queen.
There are, fortunately, two methods that may work, and these are described below. It is,
however, often best to disband a colony in this state.
