At 08:23 AM 9/18/97 -0600, you wrote: >At 09:22 PM 16/09/97 GMT+0200, you wrote: >I would like to hear more about these laying workers. Could it be that >there is a poor queen running around laying eggs? > >Eric > I was introduced to these bees while I was in Africa in the late 70's. I did not get a chance to study them much. They were found in the Cape area. The unique thing about them was that they produced diploid eggs that developed into worker bees. The main problem was that you could get several workers doing this at one time and some chaos would develop. There was some thought that the different sub families in the hive would remove eggs produced by other sub family laying workers so you would have a week hive. I did not get much further than that in my information search. There may be a lot more known about these cape bees now.