Expanding Our Family

Expanding our bee family, that is.  Don’t want anyone to get confused!  We acquired 2 more hives and now have a total of 5. Yay!

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Laying Worker Bee

A laying worker is a worker bee that lays unfertilized eggs in the absence of a queen. Only drones (male bees) develop from the eggs of a laying worker because drones only have one set of chromosomes from the mother.

This is one sign that you have a laying worker in your hive and that the hive is queenless. You can see multiple eggs in a single cell.

This particular hive we knew was queenless because we were trying to let the hive rear a new queen, but they were unsuccessful.  We bought a queen and introduced her to the hive. All is well now.