# Why are they laying eggs in Honey Super?



## psfred (Jul 16, 2011)

They are out of space or for some other reason do not want to use the brood nest.

Check to make sure it's not honey bound or colonized by SHB or something farther down. 

Bees do what bees do, sadly. If the queen was under the excluder (and you should make SURE she is, else she will keep laying in the supers!) just let the brood hatch out.

The only way there would be a bee other than the queen laying is if you had a laying worker hive -- that would be all drone comb up there. If it is all drone and you have worker brood in the brood nest, the bees wanted more drones and you didn't leave them space down below. 

Once the brood emerges, the bees will fill the cells with honey if you have a fall flow. If you don't, they will leave the super empty. I just pulled the one I put on for the soybean flow, all they were doing is chewing out the foundation. If they go nuts over the next fields to bloom, I may put it back on, but likely they aren't going to produce any more surplus this year. I want them to backfill the brood chambers for winter anyway.

Peter


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

You don't say if you have an excluder or not. Assuming you don't then they were probably laid by the queen. Probably she either ran out of room or she ran out of drone cells and wanted to lay some drone. If you do have an excluder, then you either have a queen on both sides or, if it's drone brood, a laying worker and the bees decided to keep the eggs because they needed the drones. All hives have laying workers. Broodless hives have a lot of them but queenright hives with open worker brood still have some.


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## beeware10 (Jul 25, 2010)

mb
we have been keeping bees 50yrs (25 commercial) and have never seen the statement that all hives have laying workers. maybe I missed something.


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## Joseph Clemens (Feb 12, 2005)

Perhaps this can help, Laying Worker Bees.


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## rrussell6870 (May 14, 2009)

Mike is correct... all hives do have a percentage of workers with developed ovaries... their eggs are usually removed from worker cells by the bees as long as there is a laying queen... ever see a strange mix of drone colors in hives during spring when its too early for drones to be going from hive to hive? This is due to laying workers that are laying in the honey cells outside of the brood space of the cluster... you may also see some sporadic drone cells in odd spots within the brood... this is due to laying workers that manage to sneak an egg in that was not removed by the workers for some reason or another... tiny drones are another sign... seeing one or two in a hive is just due to a laying worker depositing eggs in worker cells that again are missed by the cleaning crew and thus the cell is not enlarged in time due to the surrounding brood that they deem to be more important than enlarging the drone cell... 

These laying workers are few in queen right hives and are sometimes killed by the workers if they start getting overly brave...

Their presence doesn't necessarily mean that anything is wrong... long periods of dearths or even long winters seem to cause more to develop (still not to a number that should cause alarm)... 

It has been theorized the use of foundation led to the beginning of this phenomenon, because it caused the bees to go without their natural number of drone cells for long enough that they may have evolved to meet that need as a threat... but no scientific evidence has been presented to back that theory that I know of... we do not know if this has been going on forever, or is just a recently when it was more noticeable with a better understanding of the roles of pheromones in hives...


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

>we have been keeping bees 50yrs (25 commercial) and have never seen the statement that all hives have laying workers. maybe I missed something. 

http://www.bushfarms.com/beeslayingworkers.htm#multiple

"Anarchistic bees" 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 always small as long as ovary development is suppressed by open brood pheromones.

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 70 laying workers. In a laying worker hive it's much higher.


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