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Should a colony be unsuccessful at producing at least one successfully mated replacement queen, it will become “hopelessly queenless.” Without a queen's (and perhaps the brood's) pheromones suppressing ovary development in the workers, some workers will then commence to lay eggs, and are called “laying workers.” Unfortunately, those eggs, being unfertilized, can develop only into drones (Figure 5.25).

Figure 5.25 Typical eggs from laying workers. Unlike those laid by a queen (singly and upright in the center of each cell), laying workers often place several eggs in a cell, not centered, and sometimes on the cell wall. Compare this egg pattern to that in Figure 5.7.

Practical application: Signs of laying workers normally don't appear until around three weeks after the loss of the queen.

A laying worker hive can survive for quite some time, but tends to become “pissy” and full of undersized drones.

Practical application: Once a colony goes “laying worker,” it is difficult to requeen. Although there are any number of “folk remedies” for requeening a laying worker colony, it is generally easiest to temporarily combine it with a queenright hive, wait a few days for that queen's pheromones to again suppress the ovaries of the laying workers, and then to split the combined hive, giving the queenless portion frames of brood and an introduced queen or a queen cell.