I happen to notice that one of the top searches for my site was related to ‘laying worker and swarm cells.’ I am not sure if I have ever covered this scenario before, but I thought I would spend a few sentences on my view of this beekeeping event.

This actually happened to me a couple of days ago. In early April, a hive swarmed on me. I may have messed things up a bit, as I went in and discovered 5 or 6 swarm cells. I took one frame with cells on it and created a Nuc. I have done this countless times (successfully), but it may have created a problem for the mother hive. For some reason, I did a quick check on this hive 3 weeks later and was very confident that I found eggs (and left it at that!)

I went into the hive a couple of days ago (really intending to do a 3 minute check – pull 3 center frames in Deep, confirm queen was working and move on) for a health check and discovered laying workers. Tons of drone cells. In addition, there were numerous swarm cells. This was not a welcome sight, needless to say. I was actually thinking about selling that hive, once they built up a bit…

At any rate, I have seen this before. Laying workers are laying eggs with wild abandon (all unfertilized), but there are some bees that are still wanting to smell the pheremone put off by a real queen. So, they will create queen cells from unfertilized eggs. In truth, I do not believe that I have ever seen one capped, but I have seen many with large larvae in them, not yet capped.

The easiest way to tackle this is with a strong Nuc. I literally just finished selling all of my strong Nucs. The current Nucs are more recent and none of them strong enough to do a combine right now. So, on to the more labor intensive option 2 – frames of eggs. I dropped two frames of eggs in the hive on the day of discovery (last weekend) and will drop another this weekend. It is far from a sure fire fix, but I have definitely seen that just the presense of worker brood will cure the laying worker issue. I do not know whether the current bees recognize a good source of eggs and kill the worker or if the pheromones actually cause the ovaries in the laying worker(s) to become disabled. I will probably give them 2 weeks now and hope to see a queen (or, at this point, I will combine them with a Nuc – at least one will be strong enough to combine in a couple of weeks.)