looking deep inside

[Dallasbeek]

Experienced beeks can have some strange notions, too.  I know ag beek that's been doing this 20 or 30 years who thinks a laying worker can somehow produce worker bees.  And he kills off every drone he sees.  He's a good man and a good beekeeper, but he doesn't read much.

[BeeMaster2]

Experienced beeks can have some strange notions, too.  I know ag beek that's been doing this 20 or 30 years who thinks a laying worker can somehow produce worker bees.  And he kills off every drone he sees.  He's a good man and a good beekeeper, but he doesn't read much.

The truth be told, per an instructor at last years bee college in St Augustine, laying workers can and do on (rare) occasion, do lay female bees that can bee raised as queens.
Jim

[Dallasbeek]

Okay, I guess I'm wrong on rare occasions  :lau: :lau: 

[RHBee]

thanks
i feel like a dope
one of our beeks was trying to say the bees on foundationless comb make this and it shows witch direction the frame goes
jay

Wow,  No need for feeling like all that. How long you been doing this?

[GSF]

If someone had try to tell me that laying workers can raise a queen I'd thought, they got a lot to learn.

Then I think of Jurassic Park, nature WILL find a way.

[Dallasbeek]

Yeah, but look at all the animals and plants that went extinct.  Far as I'm concerned, good riddance to T- Rex, the saber-toothed tiger and probably a bunch more eating machines.  Just what we have can be frightening enough, like the great white :drowning:

Gary

[buzzbee]

I don't know that it makes all that much difference with housel positioning. I usually try to place frames in the way they were,but what about honey frames in the supers after extracting?
It's not a stupid question Jay, just one a lot of people don't realyy think about or pay attention to. We had a discussion on this  a few years ago, and I was just fortunate enough to remember the term for it. :)

[buzzbee]

Go to the search box in the upper right of this page  and type in Housel. It will return some of the past conversations on this subject. It does get you thinking,or at least makes you want to look in the combs and see what we are talking about! :-D

[Dallasbeek]

I don't know that it makes all that much difference with housel positioning. I usually try to place frames in the way they were,but what about honey frames in the supers after extracting?
It's not a stupid question Jay, just one a lot of people don't realyy think about or pay attention to. We had a discussion on this  a few years ago, and I was just fortunate enough to remember the term for it. :)

And there we were all thinking you just knew all this esoteric stuff.  I was trying to explain it to a friend yesterday when we were driving to Dadant's store in Paris, TX, and he said something like "you think about it long enough and you'll just go nuts."

We have a lot more reading to do.

[TenshiB]

I've heard that the cape honey bees of Africa can and commonly DO find themselves in laying worker situations in which some of the workers are able to lay female eggs. I also think that it's the cape bees that are the mean ones that create "killer" bees when mixed with the Europeans.

[Dallasbeek]

If a drone has no father but does have a grandfather, then the queen produced as a result of a laying worker is in the same situation, coming from an unfertilized mother and having a limited genetic background.  Right?  I'll leave it to superior minds to fill in the details of this, but something tells me you're going to have an inferior queen as a result. 

[Michael Bush]

Do a search online on Thelytoky

[BeeMaster2]

Here is a copy of one report:

Basically, Thelytoky is... the ability to rear workers and queens utilising the eggs from laying workers, or in some cases virgin queens. This subject has in the past been considered a rarity that only occurs in the Cape bee, apis mellifera capensis Escholtz, but it has been found in other strains.

It does occur in the European apis mellifera xxx strains but with considerably lower frequency. [1] In queenright colonies development of most worker ovaries is suppressed by the pheromone 9 - oxy - decenoic acid and possibly other substances emitted by the queen, [2] as well as substances possibly emitted by unsealed brood. [3] Workers can develop ovaries and some can lay eggs in the absence of both queen and open brood. [4]

European laying workers generally produce unfertilized haploid eggs that give rise to drones (if they develop at all). It is rare, but there are instances of both virgin queens and laying workers producing diploid eggs and those that develop, produce true female worker or queen bees. [5]

What causes Thelytoky? First a biological mechanism is needed to produce viable diploid eggs. Secondly various natural control systems need to be bye-passed or modified {see worker policing (link)}. The biological mechanism is a gobbledygook sentence that I will reproduce here, "Cape bee workers lay unfertilized diploid eggs because during ana-phase II the egg pronucleus and the central descendent of the first polar body fuse to form a diploid zygote nucleus." [6] But the behaviour modification is more difficult to understand!

I offer various quotes and elements of the original text that I hope will aid understanding...

"Given the high frequency of thelytoky in Cape bees, the relatively rare occurrence in domestic stocks of European bees is unexpected, since populations capable of thelytoky have an advantage over those in which laying worker eggs develop exclusively into drones." (Ruttner 1977) {This may now be better understood due to the recent work on worker policing by Francis Ratnieks at Sheffield University.}

"Without thelytoky, the survival of a colony rests completely on the successful mating of a single queen which must leave the hive to mate. If this queen does not encounter drones or does not return to the hive, a replacement cannot be produced because female larvae of a suitable age for queen rearing no longer exist, and because the first queen to emerge usually destroys the other queen cells in the colony. However, if brood from laying workers could be raised into queens the colony would have a facultative survival mechanism in case the virgin queen is lost. Thelytoky should occur with greater frequency in populations exposed to conditions that reduce the chances of a queen mating." (Moritz 1984)

"Reports indicate that in managed colonies thelytoky is expressed at a very low frequency" (Mackensen 1943). The reasons given for this statement are given below.

"Beekeeping practices inadvertently select against thelytoky. For example, swarming and supersedure can be minimized through various management techniques, and thus the possibility of a colony becoming queenless due to the loss of a virgin queen can be reduced. If colonies lose their queens and do not have brood to produce replacements, the queens often are replaced with new ones by beekeepers. Hence, there is no selective pressure for thelytoky in colonies managed in this manner. Conversely, the conditions under which the LUS strain was derived may have inadvertently selected for thelytoky. Virgin queens introduced into broodless colonies during the winter may not have been accepted by the workers in some cases, while in others the queens may not have mated or were lost on mating flights. Some of the colonies that survived may have done so because they requeened themselves with brood from laying workers. The winter requeening procedure was repeated annually using queens produced from brood of colonies that survived the previous year's winter requeening. If thelytoky was originally at a low frequency in the LUS strain at the beginning of the breeding program, the frequency possibly was increased because of continued selection followed by the production of new queens from brood of the survivors."

"Sometimes during an inspection bees were seen biting each other, or with their abdomens in the cell assuming an egg laying position. We sampled LUS bees being bitten and dissected them to determine if they had ovary development. Whether workers assuming the egg laying position always deposited an egg in the cell also was determined."

"Once all the brood emerged in queenless LUS, CP, or cd (control) colonies, worker bees were scattered over the frames giving the colony the distinctive appearance associated with the queenless state. Upon closer examination of bees from the 4-5 frame nucleus colonies and in the observation hives sometimes workers were seen grasping each other with their mandibles."

"In a LUS observation colony, workers were seen pulling nestmates out of the cells in which they had inserted their abdomens. On other occasions, in the observation hives we saw eggs being eaten by nestmates immediately after the laying worker removed her abdomen from the cell."

"A queen produced from laying worker eggs successfully mated and produced worker and drone brood. However, eight of the nine queens produced from workers' brood either did not return to the hive after a mating flight, or were critically injured during artificial insemination."

"A honey bee colony's ability to requeen itself with the eggs of laying workers requires not only that some workers can lay diploid eggs, but that the workers can foster the cooperation from nestmates needed to construct a queen cell and rear the egg into a queen. When laying workers developed in CP or cd colonies, often queen cells were constructed and sometimes eggs were deposited inside them. However, the eggs were either cannibalized by other workers or left unattended (untended) and did not hatch."