3.0 PRACTICE OF BEEKEEPING
The candidate will be:
3.10 able to describe the signs of laying workers and of a drone laying queen;
NOTES
If the queen has been lost from a colony for a long time the workers may start to lay eggs. Because the workers are not fertile these eggs can only develop into drones. The drones produced are smaller than usual.
The workers lay randomly around the comb, not in the usual circular brood pattern. Often the eggs are stuck to the side of a cell or more than one egg is depositied in a cell. The cell cappings are high domed like normal drone brood but appear scattered over the frames.
A queen who no longer has any sperm left to fertilise eggs can also only lay drones. The queen gathers a lifetimes worth of sperm on her mating flights and stores it in a special organ in her body. If she has had poor mating acivity, or if she has lived for a long time she may run out. The queen will continue to lay her infertile eggs in her usual brood pattern and not randomly like laying workers. Drone cells will be laid in the main area of brood nest, whereas in a normal situation, the drone cells are usually laid on the periphery of the brood area.