The curse of laying workers
“What's the greatest inconvenience for experienced beekeepers?”.
If I were to ask this question I'd expect a lot of different answers; cheap supermarket (p)honey, the fubar'd differential on the Landy, the daft licensing restrictions on Api-Bioxal, and incessant spousal nagging about propolis on the sofa.
What? Me?
However, if I asked enough beekeepers I'd wager that some of the most 'popular' responses would be about poor queen mating and laying workers.
These topics are (tenuously) related.
'Poor queen mating' includes the loss of the queen on her nuptial flights. This inevitably renders the colony queenless, quite possibly terminally {{1}}. Unless the beekeeper is 'on the ball' {{2}} the colony will go on to develop laying workers.
Poor queen mating occurs for a multitude of other reasons as well … lousy weather, insufficient drones, low fertility drones (or queens), house martens etc.
For this reason it's a rather tricky topic to discuss definitively.
Instead, I'm going to focus on the other inconvenience … laying workers, not least because I've just shaken out yet another colony that developed them after a queen failed to return from a mating flight {{3}}.
The title of this post sums up my views of laying workers.
I consider them a curse.
Once laying workers develop, without intervention, the colony is always doomed.
With intervention, the colony may still be doomed … but the demise of the colony is a long, drawn out affair that wastes valuable resources taken from other hives.
On which, more shortly.
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Laying workers and rebel workers … the same, but very different
What are laying workers, why do they occur, and what works (and does not work) in dealing with them?
The biology of laying workers is fascinating.
Whilst beekeepers have been aware of them for centuries {{4}}, recent research has demonstrated that there are actually two types of laying workers that arise under different conditions.
- 'Classic' laying workers are adult female workers that activate their ovaries after queen loss. The absence of queen mandibular pheromone (QMP), and pheromone produced from open brood, results in ovary activation, and this happens in predominantly younger adult bees. These laying workers have better developed hypopharyngeal glands (HPG), so resemble nurse bees rather than foragers. These laying workers develop in response to environmental change (the loss of the queen) as adults.
- Rebel workers are egg-laying workers that arise in response to an absence of QMP during development. These conditions occur when a colony swarms, leaving eggs and open brood in a colony that is queenless. QMP levels (usually spread through trophallaxis) drop precipitously, and some worker larvae develop in a more 'queen-like' state. The resulting workers have better developed ovarioles and mandibular glands (i.e. queen-like, rather than worker-like), but underdeveloped hypopharyngeal glands. Although rebel workers can also only lay unfertilised eggs, they have a higher reproductive potential (i.e. they lay more eggs) than classic laying workers; they have more ovarioles and their ovaries are activated to a greater extent. They also exhibit behavioural differences which I'll discuss later. Rebel workers are considered a distinct sub-caste of honey bees.
Although they arise via different mechanisms, in terms of practical beekeeping, their impact on the hive (and how to deal with them) are broadly similar … and I'll get to those in due course.