Usually, only the queen bee lays eggs, but if the queen bee gets killed and the hive has not made another queen cell to take the old queen's place, then a worker bee becomes the queen until another queen cell is made. When the new queen is made, the laying worker dies of old age or is killed by the new queen.
Two visits ago, we scraped out five queen cells, which look more like a half of a peanut shell about the size of a kid's half-thumb. Beekeepers scrape out queen cells to avoid having too many queens, which makes the hive swarm. We probably should have left 1 or 2.
This time, when we checked on the bees, we knew that there was a laying worker in the second hive that we opened. We knew this because the brood was spotty; by that I mean that there was no actual place where all of the eggs would be. One would be five inches away from the next. The queen lays in one section until it is full and then moves to another frame. The bees place the honey in the top three boxes and the eggs on the bottom. Since there were only three boxes, the bees started to build another hive beneath the hive they are supposed to be in and were just laying eggs everywhere. The laying worker lays eggs in many different spots.
If you ever want to keep bees, be on the lookout for the Loudoun Star Dispatch and the Laying Worker!
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