Beekeeping Laying Workers Part 1

hey everybody hey I want to talk to you today about laying workers in a beehive what's it mean when the workers start laying the [Music] eggs well you never think it today but actually they are predicting a snow storm coming in to Illinois and as a result all of us are getting ready for uh big snow so I'm getting my Bobcat ready and I got my snow plow on which means Sherry has gone to the grocery store because Sherry and all people in Illinois know that if a snow is coming you have to go to the store and you have to buy bread and you usually have to buy milk you have to buy those two things so it's not uncommon to go to the grocery store when they are saying snow is coming and find all the bread's gone and all the milk is gone but the funny thing is you know after after it snows you know there's everybody has all this bread and all this milk that they didn't use and it's like well that was silly to go and do that but I guess I guess we feel like if we get snowed in that we can all sit around and eat bread and drink milk and so that's just some tradition that you have to do is milk and bread I love this Bobcat it's just it's not a very big one so I can drive it into our buildings I can carry pallets into buildings you know it it it holds about 800 to 1,000 lb pallets so it's really a lot stronger than it looks I got the fully enclosed cab so that when I start plowing snow which I I did last year uh you know you stay warm I got the heater in there and fully surround uh glass cage so wipers can't you can't really plow snow without a wiper on your front windshield and I can put it in here and so when I'm ready after it snows as you can tell it's ready to go right out the door no matter how big the snow piles up I can just boom right out the door wo oh wow I can't hold my eyes open it's snowing here today we have had to close our business because of the winter conditions of a blizzard today and as you can see I'm just getting I I can't even keep my eyes open look at my shirt I'm getting plastered so this is Illinois blizzard blizzard blizzard I don't know if you live where it snows a lot but if you have never experienced that it is a hoot and I'm going back inside I can't take this anymore I wish I could describe to you what it's like today to be in Illinois on a very windy snowy day it's kind of fun because uh we're we're just blown in it's a blizzard condition they're advising us not to travel not to go anywhere almost zero visibility and uh the power is on right now but it's been going off and on and off and on it was off a long time now it's back on so if you see the power go off while I'm filming then uh we'll just have to bludgeon our way through it but today I want to talk to you about some issues that I hear people bring up about laying workers and that means that the queen is no longer in the colony and workers have started laying eggs workers do not normally uh lay eggs they can't they can lay eggs but they're not as developed or as complex of course as the Queen is uh workers have no way to be fertilized so when a worker does lay an egg it's going to be an unfertilized egg which becomes a drone you're right the male bee but there are times when workers do start laying eggs but let me first tell you how it's supposed to really go first since there's a queen present that means a mated Queen is laying eggs in the colony all the other bees sort of give up their right eggs because of pheromones pheromones from the queen is reducing or clamping down the uh worker bees from being able to lay eggs and also the pheromones from The Brood uh causes the clamping down of the workers not to be able to lay certainly not much in the way of eggs I would say probably occasionally even in a a hive with a strong Queen it's possible that there would be some eggs being laid by workers but they I think they'd be quickly eaten up and by other bees but so what happens when you get a laying worker what happens is your queen has been gone for probably 3 weeks that means that there has been no brood being laid in the colony for 3 weeks and so you don't have that suppression on the laying workers anymore the fairmon is not CL clamping down the laying workers's ability from laying eggs and so you have worker bees female worker bees that have not you know they're not capable of being fertilized they're they're going to start laying and they're going to lay eggs that are only going to develop into drones now a worker be does not make a very good Queen she's smaller she can't push her abdomen all the way down to the base of the cell of a regular siiz cell so so laying worker eggs can be noticed because there's going to be a lot of eggs in the base of the cells and sometimes they're not even at the base they're going to be along the wall because of the short abdomen of the worker bees so a lot of people will assess their hive to see if they have a ling worker and the first thing you want to look for do I have a queen if I do uh I could still have laying workers but that's going to go away really quickly if it's a brand new Queen uh do so do I have a queen do I have brood whether you have open brood or sealed brood that pheron is enough to keep laying workers from going crazy laying eggs everywhere in your Colony okay normally I I answer questions on Friday but I got this is I got this letter today in the mail and it says priority so anything that's a priority mail envelope it it deserves you know priority so what we'll do is open this up and uh find out what is so urgent what is a priority what what's going on uhoh it's all stuck there we go oops photo inside okay hi David and Sherry these bees are from a tree that Jan and I captured today loggers called me I think it looks like a laying worker from closeup I sent on email info sorry for the bother but could you let me know your thoughts and where to go from here thanks James from Tennessee all right send a photo wants to know if this is laying workers no next question wow um interesting I always like looking at people's photos and evaluating what I see you know because you don't have to worry about getting stung that this Photograph can't sting you and he's really done a good job uh taking this picture I'm going to show it to you in just a minute okay so don't don't go like hey let us see let us see let us see I'm going to show it to you I'm going to put my glasses on um so I can look up closer at some of these uh cells that are in this photo and then I want to show it to you okay yep bu laying worker oh interesting do I think that's a laying worker absolutely not I do not think it's a laying worker and I'm going to tell you why okay here's why let me uh let me bring this closer to you so let me point out a few things how I know it's not a laying worker First Look At The Brood over here it's all worker brood the phermones have not been gone that long because these are cap over and as you can see some of these haven't been kept over very long because these are 78 day old larva or yeah larvae this is a pupa okay now I see why James is saying this if you look right here at my finger you can see an egg there on the wall it looks like two eggs here and two eggs there uh so he's seeing these multip M eggs and that's why he thinks it's a laying worker it could be there's a percentage you know a small chance that okay maybe it is but I don't think so because we have open brood fairmon we have cat brood that the Queen the queen was here 8 days ago and remember you need 21 days without a queen before you get work laying workers look at this there's a oh maybe 3 day old lar or one day old larvae and it's perfectly in the center perfectly in the center that's what Queens do perfectly in the center Center Center so what I think when I see this this is a new Queen usually in my case I raise queens and these new Queens will sometimes go back over or just be laying kind of everywhere kind of crazy sometimes I've seen Queens walk around with um eggs hanging out of their abdomen I'm coming back around so um the eggs aren't always positioned exactly the way you think they would be so no not a laying worker brood is too young The Hive has not been queenless long enough okay thank you Jim that that uh that was cool we got some cool pictures that hang up on the wall here if you have some pictures you'd like to send us uh feel free to do that and we'll diagnose your hive and we will probably be 20% accurate in making a successful diagnosis with a photograph because who the heck really knows unless you get into a hive right disclaimer noted okay hey subscribe I need 50,000 subscribers by the end of the year that means we need to add quite a few more we're just about 5,000 200 and something so thank you for subscribing and uh you can subscribe below you can comment below and we'll have a good time uh check us out on our website at honeybees online.com back of the shirt tells it all honeybees online.com and you can check out all other cool videos that we have we have beekeeping News letters about neat discoveries that we send out hey thanks for getting associated with honeybees online .c learn more we want to help you get started in keeping honeybees we'll try to get some [Music] footage all right selfie stick there it is way over here

Channel: David Burns

Views: 12,804

Keywords: Laying Workers, drones, failing queen

Id: CDSgKCEjXvw

Length: 13min 21sec (801 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 25 2016