Aaron Wolfenbarger wrote:
>
> H*lp!!!!!!!!  I just came in from checking the hive and there is a LOT of bad
> news.  There is no queen no brood and no swarm cells.All cells that have
> anything in them have nectar,pollen or drones.(all of which is very few.)  I
> need some help BAD!!!!!!!  I don't know  what to do.    Please reply fast!!!!
 
This could be a laying worker problem if the drone brood is not all
capped.  If the colony is hopelessly queenless for a period of time,
some workers will develop ovaries and start to lay. The symptoms are 1)
no queen  2) no brood except scattered drone brood in all stages of
development  3) LOTS of honey in the brood chamber and elsewhere  4)
possibly some poorly formed queen cells (with drone larvae in them!!)
5) eggs layed at odd angles or two in a cell.
There can be a substantial amount of drone brood, but it's undersized,
and peppered across the frames in a pathetic pattern.
Not a pretty picture at all!!
 
If this turns out to be a laying worker situation, DO NOT try to
introduce a queen.
It never seems to work, no matter how careful you are. The problem is
that the colony thinks the laying workers are queens and  will not
accept your new queen. The only method I know of that works most of the
time is this:
 
Set the hive off to the side of its usual location and put another hive
with at least 5 frames of brood in all stages and with a strong laying
queen in its place.
 
Then shake and brush ALL the bees from the laying worker hive off the
frames onto the ground directly in front of the queenright hive.  I
usually spray them lightly with a thin sugar syrup also.  This
thoroughly disorients the laying workers and when they enter the
queenright hive they apparently forget their bad habits.
 
As you empty the boxes that contained the LW colony, put them on top of
the queenright colony above the excluder to ensure that there's enough
room for the bees clustering on the ground in front of the hive.  The
drone brood will hatch out about the time the honey is capped in these
boxes and you can then extract it and recover the brood boxes. When you
extract the frames most of the LW drone cells are recovered as worker
cells since LW drones are usually undersized, having been reared in
worker cells that are extended past the usual worker depth.
 
When I find a queenless hive that shows signs of laying workers, I
perform this procedure immediately since all the bees are getting old
and time is short to save them.  I have encountered this 3 times, and so
far it has worked every time.  Laying workers are a major pain, but
there is a silver lining to even this problem:  a laying worker hive
usually makes a lot of honey since there is almost no brood in the hive.
 
By the way, I've never tried this except in a strong honey flow, and I
doubt that the queenright hive would accept the bees from the LW hive
otherwise.
 
Michael Reddell
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http://www.hotcity.com/~mwr