Steve Rose writes:

>> There is no way to 'save' a laying worker colony, because it is already
>> genetically dead.  In all the other methods, where you put in frames of
>> brood and shake and add queens, you are just combining it with another
>> colony, but in a super labor-intensive and inefficient way.

Peter near Stratford-upon-Avon disagrees:

> If the laying worker colony has a large number of bees then those
> are worth saving.  There is very little work involved in combining
> it with a nuc.

... which is all very well if one happens to have a nuc handy!  :-/

I'm grateful to see this dicussion happening now, as I have such
a situation.  Or rather, my neighbour started with a split (of mine)
and a (commercially purchased) queen last June, but while the queen
was released from her cage, she doesn't seem to have survived: no
sign of her, no brood nest, a few capped drone cells on frame edges.
Unfortunately, he noticed the problem only recently.

(I'm gathering from a few sources that this year has been a poor one
for queens in our area; another neighbour just up the street had her
hive lose its new queen as well.  This is just word-of-mouth; I have
no reliable stats.)

Anyway, now my neighbour would like to "save" his hive, and has read
of a technique whereby one introduces a frame of relatively young
brood once a week for three weeks.  According to his understanding,
the pheromones given off by the larvae eventually put a stop to
the laying worker problem, and the bees then raise their own queen
(assuming of course that some of the donated frames contained eggs).

If all this had happened in June, I'd have no problem at all
with donating the required three frames, but I understand that
mid-August is when bees in my area (Montreal) start making winter
bees, and I'm hesitant to possibly put my own (healthy, 4th-year)
colony at risk of not surviving the winter, just to proceed with
a technique whose chances of success strike me as "iffy" at best:
even if it "works" and his hive raises a queen, will she be able
to mate properly and to make enough winter bees before the cold season?

I promised my neighbour that I'd take a look at my brood nest this
week-end and decide whether I can spare three frames.  If I decide
that I can't, we're faced with the question of "closing down" his
colony without letting it get robbed out (angry bees don't make
good neighbours in the suburbs!) nor letting it become a mite bomb.

My thought was to reduce them to a single box, keep the entrance at
the smallest setting, treat them for mites, and let them die off
in their own time.

If anyone on the list has an informed opinion on (a) how risky it
is to remove frames of brood from a hive preparing for winter, and
(b) whether/how it's possible to let a hive die off without causing
problems, I'd be most interested.


Anne, backyard beekeeper in Montreal.

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