Hi Waldemar

 >> can you have a laying worker in the same colony with an
 >> infertile queen?

 > As far as I know the answer is no or rarely.  The scent
 > from a drone-laying queen will suppress potential laying
 > workers' development.

The possibility is higher than you suggest, but I could not give 
percentages.

A drone laying queen can be a drone layer due to inadequate mating and 
thus produce a normal amount of queen pheromone, but a queen that is 
laying drones because she is old and has run out of semen, will have 
been deteriorating in the amount of pheromone as well as laying 
progressively fewer eggs, so you get the double whammy of low queen 
pheromone and low amounts of brood pheromone (both of which normally 
inhibit worker ovary development. Another thing that may contribute to 
this is that brood pheromone emitted by drone brood, may be different 
and thus act differently.

Mostly laying workers occur in large numbers rather than singularly, if 
the conditions are right for them to develop at all.


Regards & Best 73s, Dave Cushman, G8MZY
http://website.lineone.net/~dave.cushman or http://www.dave-cushman.net
Short FallBack M/c, Build 6.02/3.1 (stable)

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