Talk:Laying worker bee
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Is this article really a stub now?--XC0000005 22:39, 4 August 2006 (UTC)
Problem! Please control this link Cpyright? --62.10.115.21 12:49, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
Not a problem - I don't care if the text from my site matches wikipedia. If I remember right I posted the content here first, so if anything I'll modify my web site version to be different than what I've posted here. XC0000005 23:46, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
Brood pheromone is mentioned here, but so is queen pehromone and actually a lack of queen pheromone is NOT the cause of laying workers. A lack of open worker brood pheromone is:
See page 11 of "The Wisdom of the Hive" by Tom Seeley:
"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 easy and consistently reliable solution, if the hive is convenient and you have access to other hives to get open brood, is to put a frame of open brood in every week for three weeks until they start rearing queen cells. Then you can treat it as any normal queenless hive with a queen cell and either let them rear the queen or introduce one.
The text says there are multiple laying workers, but seems to imply there are only a few laying workers. This is not true.
"Anarchistic bees" (laying workers) are ever present but usually in small enough numbers to not cause a problem and are simply policed by the workers UNLESS they need drones. The number is alway small as long as ovary development is suppressed.
See page 9 of "The Wisdom of the Hive"
"Although worker honey bees cannot mate, they do possess ovaries and can produce viable eggs; hence they do have the potential to have male offspring (in bees and other Hymenoptera, fertilized eggs produce females while unfertilized eggs produce males). It is now clear, however, that this potential is exceedingly rarely realized as long as a colony contains a queen (in queenless colonies, workers eventually lay large numbers of male eggs; see the review in Page and Erickson 1988). One supporting piece of evidence comes from studies of worker ovary development in queenright colonies, which have consistently revealed extremely low levels of development. All studies to date report far fewer than 1 % of workers have ovaries developed sufficiently to lay eggs (reviewed in Ratnieks 1993; see also Visscher 1995a). For example, Ratnieks dissected 10,634 worker bees from 21 colonies and found that only 7 had moderately developed egg (half the size of a completed egg) and that just one had a fully developed egg in her body."
If you do the math, in a normal, booming, queenright hive of 100,000 bees that's 700 laying workers. In a laying worker hive it's much higher.
Also all the research I've seen on shaking out bees has shown it does NOTHING to get rid of ANY of the laying workers. They are all back at the original hive in seconds. This is also consistent with my experience. The only hope for shaking out, is to demoralize them enough that they will accept a queen and I've only seen this work occasionally and certainly not consistently.
http://www.bushfarms.com/beeslayingworkers.htm
Michael Bush 14:52, 19 July 2007 (UTC)
In my experience, a queenlees hive has the opportunity to raise a new queen if there are eggs of the correct age present. However, from direct experience, the laying worker hive, obviously with out a laying queen, has been righted time and time again by shakout and immediately combining with a queen right colony using a page of newspaper between brood boxes. LTabit 11:50 15 Aug 2007
