The reason for starting a new thread for this topic, I didn't want make it look like I was hijacking someone eases thread. This is something that has puzzled me from the time I started keeping bees. I have read so much about laying workers at an early time from queen loss. I have never, ever had laying workers. I had one colony that went "42" days and may have been longer. the bees never acted like anything was wrong. It was a strong colony and when I finally gave them a queen they took off like a rocket. Resulting in one of the biggest colonies I have ever had. Can any one really give a definite reason why some bees do this and some don't? I under stand the workers can develop overas. That said can a worker's drone fertilize a queen. did I say that right? d2
Quote from: don2 on May 01, 2015, 11:01:42 PMCan any one really give a definite reason why some bees do this and some don't?
Definitive ? Not a chance. Here's a taste of the muddy waters which have been surrounding this issue:
QuoteSome authors (Lotmar, 1945; Beetsma, 1979) observed a difference in ovariole number in the ovaries of worker and queen larvae, starting with the differential feeding of the larvae, but others show that the ovaries from worker and queen larvae grow continuously during the larval phase (Meier, 1916; Bueno, 1981), without a great difference between them, suggesting that only by the end of the larval phase are the differences between the ovaries of queen and worker established (Bueno, 1981; Hartfelder & Steinbr?ck, 1997).
These results seem conflicting but the present work shows that the differences in ovary size clearly starts once the feeding of the larvae becomes different. Reabsorption of ovarioles were seen by Reginato & Cruz-Landim (2002) since the 3rd instar in worker larvae and confirmed in this work.
OVARIAN GROWTH DURING LARVAL DEVELOPMENT OF QUEEN AND WORKER OF Apis mellifera (HYMENOPTERA: APIDAE): A MORPHOMETRIC AND HISTOLOGICAL STUDY. REGINATO, R. D. and CRUZ-LANDIM, C., 1971.
QuoteI under stand the workers can develop overas.
All female bees develop ovaries during the first couple of days of larval development. Those subjected to a restricted diet then undergo reabsorption of ovarioles, the reabsorption of which may only be partial - thus allowing some workers to retain fully functional ovaries, which are normally inhibited from functioning due to the presence of queen pheromone. However, if queen pheromone is absent for an extended period, a worker with functional ovaries may then begin laying. This laying worker will produce a pheromone which both inhibits other potential laying workers, and fools the colony into believing that a viable queen is currently in residence. Thus the introduction of a replacement queen by the beekeeper is fraught with difficulty.
One further complication I have witnessed is that the bees sometimes realise that something is amiss with their laying worker bee, and try to supercede her by drawing-down one of her drone cells into a queen cell. Such queen cells are much longer than normal q/cells and have a smoother, more regular external appearance. I call such cells 'lady-boy cells', as they have a more-or-less authentic appearance, but in fact are lacking all the essential bits ...
The bees usually tear-down such cells in mid-term as they realise their mistake, by which time the colony is usually dejected and demoralised.
I have found that shaking all the bees out in front of fully functioning hives and starting a new colony from scratch is the only sure way of dealing with the problem of laying workers.
LJ
Enlightening.
Have to use that phrase again/ "They call it understanding, standing. Thanks little john, d2
You're welcome. Except I still haven't answered your question of why some do, and some don't ... which I guess is just down to nature playing roulette.
Or in AA Milne's classic words: "You never can tell with bees ..."
(http://i61.tinypic.com/1265u2q.jpg)
LJ
>Can any one really give a definite reason why some bees do this and some don't?
First, it's not queenlessness, but broodlessness that causes laying workers.
>I under stand the workers can develop overas. That said can a worker's drone fertilize a queen. did I say that right?
Yes and yes.
Well, after all these years it finally happened to me. The split that I did not add brood to has laying workers. The other split hasn't did so yet. It is the one I added brood to But they did not make any cells. I will pull another frame tomorrow and make sure it has some eggs in it. thank goodness it was the one with fewer bees. Now I can say after 15 + years of beekeeping I had a colony to develop laying workers. I am now an official bee keeper. lol! d2
Well - I did say that these were "muddy waters" ... :smile:
MB's opinion is that it's broodlessness, my money would be on queenlessness - this guy has found that leaving the queen cell
in situ prevents the 'laying worker' scenario from developing:
QuoteAt one stage of our Queen Rearing discovery we used to remove the emerged cell as soon as possible, resulting in a large amount of 'laying workers' if the queen failed to return from her mating flight. Now we leave the open emerged cells in the hive until we are ready to check for eggs. It is my opinion that the release of Royal jelly into the food chain, as the workers will clean up the Royal jelly left by the queen, helps to prevent 'laying worker' formation in hives where the queen is lost to mating flights. We have noted that some hives will die out waiting for a virgin to return, as others, where we removed the open cells quickly will turn 'laying worker' much quicker.
http://www.beeworks.com/informationcentre/mating_hives.html
So it seems pretty clear that it's the absence of pheromone being circulated around the colony that's the culprit. It just remains to establish "pheromone from which source - queen or brood (or either, or both) ?" I'm sure there must be a research paper on this topic somewhere - I'll have a ferret around ...
LJ
Update:Just found MB's page on laying workers - seems he beat me to it (some time ago):
http://www.bushfarms.com/beeslayingworkers.htm
It appears that I've been working with out-of-date info. Story of my life. I'm still running Windows 98. :smile:
THis is a observation of mine--if the colony goes quenelles -it takes several weeks to see a laying worker
problem--this is well after all brood has hatched---
so here is a another observation---if i shake a small package my be two pounds of bees to start a nuke
and if there is a a failure with the queen--the small start that was quenelles becomes laying worker as fast as
the other nukes that accept the queen--keep in mind that all are shaken from brood comb at the same date--
so these are strictly nurse bees--for starts-it makes a difference -what shape the hive is in at the time you make
your observations--nurse bees are the friends- field bees are more defensive--there are fail safe mechanisms bees are prewired with -one is they can rejuvenate back to make bee milk from a field bee --this keeps the chances for the colony survival at the best odds --
so its got alot to do with the age of the bee after they are off brood-thats for the time frame
as far as keeping it at bay i think open brood is they answer- we have had lots of talk about it
--RDY-B
>MB's opinion is that it's broodlessness, my money would be on queenlessness
>Just found MB's page on laying workers - seems he beat me to it (some time ago):
http://www.bushfarms.com/beeslayingworkers.htm
See page 11 of Wisdom of the hive:
"the queen's pheromones are neither necessary nor sufficient for inhibiting worker's ovaries. Instead, they strongly inhibit the workers from rearing additional queens. It is now clear that the pheromones that provide the proximate stimulus for workers to refrain from laying eggs come mainly from the brood, not from the queen (reviewed in Seeling 1985; see also Willis, Winston, and Slessor 1990)."
The significance is this: since it is brood pheromones that are the issue, and not queen pheromones, you can set things right by providing open brood every week for three weeks. After that you can treat as any queenless hive. Let them rear their own queen, or introduce a queen.
If I remember right, CC Miller said just take the frame of laying workers and put them in other hives. Is this or my memory correct? My neighbor and I both have laying worker hives. I've had so many swarms I was counting on this happening.
At my neighbor's place we plan to take them about 20 yards out and shake them, then remove their hive. We've put another new hive with a laying queen about 3 or 4 feet from their old one. There is another hive about the same distance to the other side. I've read that when they return and can't find their home they are humbled and try to join other hives politely, is that so?
Hey Rdy-b, My experience has shown me that a hive will become a laying worker hive quicker than that. It could be the different times of year as well. Maybe different bees too?
I put the second frame of brood in this past Monday, It was about half and half eggs and brood. I checked it Friday and there was no queen cells but it looked like some of the eggs had just hatched. will this coming Friday be too late to check it again for q cells? I am quiet sure the other nuc is laying workers but I decided to give it more time, thinking the Queen could have been delayed during that week of inclement weather. One question I haven't ask but have been taking it for granite. can a unmated queen even lay eggs If so then there shouldn't be laying workers. right. :oops: d2
After posting this bit, I googled "drone laying queen" and found a good site. Yes to my own question, a queen that has not mated or something else went wrong, she will still lay eggs. Drone eggs. If I remember correctly, when I found eggs in the hive in question, I did notice not multiple eggs in the cells, also all eggs were on bottom in center. If that is what I have, now to find her. Rather deal with this situation than laying workers. d2
In my experience, queens that have not mated never lay eggs. This becomes obvious when you have a queen with crumpled wings. Queens who mated LATE lay only drones. Queens that run out of sperm lay only drones. But all drone laying queens are mated. Queens who don't lay are not mated.
Quote from: Michael Bush on May 04, 2015, 09:16:04 AM
since it is brood pheromones that are the issue, and not queen pheromones, you can set things right by providing open brood every week for three weeks. After that you can treat as any queenless hive. Let them rear their own queen, or introduce a queen.
My initial reaction to Mike's suggestion to give laying worker colonies frames of brood was: "that doesn't make any sense", for the brood being created by those laying workers would have been generating it's own brood pheromone - so how could giving even more brood offer any advantage (other than by creating a higher concentration) ?
Also - brood pheromone emitted by the laying worker's brood should have an inhibitory function on the worker's activated ovaries, thus producing a self-negating dynamic - which (in my experience) doesn't actually happen in practice.
And so I've spent the last few days reading-up on pheromones ...
It appears that Mike Bush's webpage is out-of-date; Tom Seeley's quote is out-of-date; and my own view that Queen Mandibular Pheromone was alone responsible for inhibiting laying by workers is also out-of-date ... indeed, we're all out-of-date as this is such a fast-moving area of biological research.
Quote"the queen's pheromones are neither necessary nor sufficient for inhibiting worker's ovaries. [...] It is now clear that the pheromones that provide the proximate stimulus for workers to refrain from laying eggs come mainly from the brood, not from the queen (reviewed in Seeling 1985; see also Willis, Winston, and Slessor 1990)."
So wrote Thomas Seeley in 'Wisdom of the Hive' back in 1995.
But in 1998, Winston and Slessor updated their views thus:
Quote"Perhaps the most interesting of the unknown queen pheromones originates in the head, in a non-mandibular source. Extracts from queen heads provide almost twice the attractiveness to workers than QMP alone, and recent research has demonstrated that this additional attraction is not due to mandibular gland components, either known or unidentified (Slessor et al., 1997). We are currently working to identify the compound(s) and glandular source of this secretion, [...]"
"Another possible function of unidentified queen pheromones is the suppression of worker ovary development. This area of pheromone biology has been seriously under-studied, and is of unusual significance because it appears to involve the interaction between queen pheromones and brood-produced substances. There is strong evidence indicating that brood produces the primary signal that inhibits worker ovary development, with a queen pheromone providing a secondary signal, but this pheromonal concert remains unexplored. In addition, brood appears to produce a secondary signal inhibiting queen rearing, but the chemical nature and biological function of this putative pheromone is obscure."
Honey bee primer pheromones and colony organization: gaps in our knowledge. Mark L. Winston, Keith N. Slessor (1998)
By 2003 however, it appears that we have come 'full circle' with QMP once again placed centre stage as the pheromone responsible for controlling the development of ovaries in worker bees:
QuoteWe conclude that QMP is responsible for the ovary-regulating pheromonal capability of queens from European-derived Apis mellifera subspecies.
Hoover SER, Keeling CI, Winston ML, Slessor KN: The effect of queen pheromones on worker honey bee ovary development, 2003.
However, in
2004, Katzav-Gozansky et al., "Queen-signal modulation of worker pheromonal composition in honeybees", demonstrated (by the use of a double screen mesh which prevented bee-to-bee physical contact) that the pheromone responsible for ovarian development in workers is actually a non-volatile substance:
Quote"Workers separated from the queenright compartment by a double mesh behaved like queenless workers, activating their ovaries and expressing a queen-like Dufour?s gland secretion, confirming that the pheromones regulating both systems are non-volatile."
Being a non-volatile pheromone then, this finding eliminates both Brood Pheromone AND Queen Mandibular Pheromone as being the controlling substance.The latest relevant paper I've been able to source is :
"New insights into honey bee (Apis mellifera) pheromone communication. Is the queen mandibular pheromone alone in colony regulation ?" by Maisonnasse et al., 2010.Part of their abstract reads:
QuoteResults: Demandibulated queens had no detectable (E)-9-oxodec-2-enoic acid (9-ODA), the major compound in QMP, yet they controlled worker behavior (cell construction and queen retinue) and physiology (ovary inhibition) as efficiently as intact queens.
Conclusions: We demonstrated that the queen uses other pheromones as powerful as QMP to control the colony. It follows that queens appear to have multiple active compounds with similar functions in the colony (pheromone redundancy). Our findings support two hypotheses in the biology of social insects: (1) that multiple semiochemicals with synonymous meaning exist in the honey bee, (2) that this extensive semiochemical vocabulary exists because it confers an evolutionary advantage to the colony.
So - for some time now there have been two competing hypotheses: worker control or queen control. This paper supports the latter hypothesis, but whether this viewpoint will be maintained within future research remains to be seen - as the search for a definitive explanation for the 'laying worker phenomenon' continues.
If anyone has access to any later work (as I no longer have unlimited university library access), it would be appreciated if you'd contact me.
Hope this rather long post has been of interest - at least to someone !
LJ
What I do know, is that a frame of open brood every week for three weeks has never failed to fix a laying worker hive. If queen pheromones are necessary to suppress laying workers, then this would not work.
So all this brings me to believe that if I have a nuc/small colony that fails in making a queen cell after adding 3 or more brood frames then I have no other alternative than to make up this colony along with a cloak board with a screen to keep the bees from getting in one another's hive. That is if the queen less colony has not already developed laying workers. So if we do this as soon as we see the hive is queen less and we could not acquire another queen by other means. Comes extra queens with this move.
My conclusion. d2
Little John.
That is pretty interesting. Adding in Michael's comments, which adding brood has been used for years to prevent laying workers as well as restore balance, there is still a lot more that we do not know about the little bee.
Jim
In the two splits I had, the day I discovered eggs in one and none in the other I put the first brood frame in the one that had no eggs. A week ago last Monday I added the second frame of brood. I now have 2 good looking capped queen cells in that one. Lots of capped drone cells in the other. go figure.
On another note, I have noticed a lot of entries on the forum about queen less package set up developing egg laying workers early on. That should say something about the brood playing a "big" part.
If I get a good queen from one of these cells I will have to add another box asap because of the extra brood I put in. It is a 10 frame medium and has 7 & 1/2 frames of bees and all the brood has not emerged yet.
will update in about 10+ days. d2
ditto on the interesting reads and comments from everybody
Quote from: sawdstmakr on May 14, 2015, 12:59:02 PM
Little John.
That is pretty interesting. Adding in Michael's comments, which adding brood has been used for years to prevent laying workers as well as restore balance, there is still a lot more that we do not know about the little bee.
Jim
You've never spoken a truer word ...
I think it's aways important to remember that academic research is directed towards understanding the underlying mechanisms involved, whereas beekeepers are simply interested in what works in practice. And, of course, academic theories keep being demolished and reformed as new information comes to light.
Two years ago, I spent several months giving frames of open brood to a laying worker colony every 6 days, which turned into an ego battle between human and insect. The insects won, hand's down. I wouldn't do it again - far too much time and resources went into that experiment. That was my underlying motivation for researching this issue.
If giving brood works for others, fine. I read that Randy Oliver recommends combining laying workers with a Q+ colony - but personally I wouldn't recommend anything other than to cut one's losses, take the hit, cast those bees to the four winds - and simply make up another colony from scratch. It's a lot quicker, surer, and far more economical on resources.
LJ
I don't know about turning them around after workers have started laying. The fact that I did not give brood to the colony that I found eggs in, I was about that time that the queen would have started laying had there been one. There was no capped brood so I could not know it was worker eggs, They all in the bottom of the cell and not multiples. The colony I added brood too had no eggs at the time, so I am assuming it kept them in check. Got two queen cells now. d2
>So all this brings me to believe that if I have a nuc/small colony that fails in making a queen cell after adding 3 or more brood frames...
>Two years ago, I spent several months giving frames of open brood to a laying worker colony every 6 days, which turned into an ego battle between human and insect.
I've never seen it fail... but you can never tell with bees...
Quote from: Michael Bush on May 15, 2015, 12:58:26 PM
>So all this brings me to believe that if I have a nuc/small colony that fails in making a queen cell after adding 3 or more brood frames...
>Two years ago, I spent several months giving frames of open brood to a laying worker colony every 6 days, which turned into an ego battle between human and insect.
I've never seen it fail... but you can never tell with bees...
IF there is a virgin queen -or a queen that has failed -or one that mated and the drones failed
the combinations are several--RDY-B
If giving brood works for others, fine. I read that Randy Oliver recommends combining laying workers with a Q+ colony - but personally I wouldn't recommend anything other than to cut one's losses, take the hit, cast those bees to the four winds - and simply make up another colony from scratch. It's a lot quicker, surer, and far more economical on resources.
More often than not, Litle John is correct.
I was taught to shake them out... 38 years ago, and agree that it is usually thte best time spent fo tthe work and use of resources involved.. but I have 50+ hives.....
If you only have three or four hives....
It might be worth your time to add a frame of brood. Two weeks later, add another frame of brood..
I have seen queen cells built on that second frame. If not, add the third frame two weeks later..
Normally, it is the third frame that gets the queen cells drawn out.
At this point, if they do not start a new queen within the next two weeks.. cut your losses and shake them out.