Frame Guide › Queen problems
Laying Worker: what it looks like on the frame
A colony that's been loud and 'roary' for weeks. No calm hum.
Multiple eggs jammed onto cell sidewalls, drone-domed cappings scattered through worker-sized cells, and no coherent pattern. With no queen and no open brood for weeks, workers' ovaries switched on. None of those eggs will make workers.
Add open brood weekly, or unite with a queenright colony
A laying-worker colony will kill a new caged queen almost every time. Giving a frame of open brood each week (or combining with a strong queenright hive) is the real fix. The deeper lesson: never let a colony sit queenless this long.
Easy to mistake for
- Healthy Brood PatternJune · a strong colony, bees calm and covering the comb.
- Swarm CellsEarly May · booming population, bees boiling out the front.
- Honey-Bound Brood NestStrong flow on. Bees crowding, and the queen seems to have nowhere to go.
Could you spot this with the lid off?
Read the Frame deals you 8 random frames. Say what you see, say what you'd do, and find out why. It's free and runs on your phone.
Drill queen problems → Mixed round (all 32 frames) →More queen problems
- Healthy Brood PatternJune · a strong colony, bees calm and covering the comb.
- Swarm CellsEarly May · booming population, bees boiling out the front.
- Supersedure CellsNothing dramatic. The pattern has just gotten patchy lately.
- Drone-Laying QueenQueen is present, but the brood looks bumpy and raised all over.
- Emergency Queen CellsYou rolled the queen ten days ago. This is the same colony now.
- Can't Find the QueenYou went through every frame twice and never saw the queen.
- New Queen Laying Double EggsThe queen you introduced started laying five days ago.
- Waiting on a Virgin QueenThis colony swarmed 16 days ago. No eggs, no larvae anywhere.
- Empty Queen CupsMid-April · the colony is building fast. Along the bottom bars you find these.
These frames are drawn to teach the pattern, and real frames vary. From The Alleman Apiary in Middletown, PA.