The first part of a strong hive is the queen. Every hive should not only have a queen, but a queen that is young, and well mated with a good brood pattern. A good brood pattern is not only controlled by the age, and genetics of a queen, but also how well she was mated. Any queen with a bad brood pattern should be pinched and replaced. However any newly mated, or newly introduced queen should be given a week or two from introduction, or mating, before she is evaluated.

Beekeepers often find themselves facing the problem of a hive with laying workers. The cause of a laying worker hive is simply that the hive has gone queenless, and the workers failed to raise a queen from the brood that was available when then went queenless. After a while all the brood has emerged, and the bees find themselves without a queen, and without pheromone from brood. This causes the worker's ovaries to develop, and they start laying eggs.

This presents the beekeeper with a particularly frustrating situation because the other workers have now accepted a laying worker as their queen. However workers will never mate and will only lay unfertilized eggs, producing only drone brood. Because the workers believe that they already have a queen, they well not easily accept another queen introduced by the beekeeper. This presents another problem because it is almost impossible to identify which workers are the laying workers.

There are a few solutions to this problem. If the hive is fairly weak already, the beekeeper can simply shake all the bees off into the hive, and let them parish. However if the hive is strong enough to be worth saving, the first step I take is to give the hive two frames of capped brood, and two frames of eggs. This allows the workers to raise another queen while also keeping a fairly good number of young bees in the hive to maintain some strength.

If this fails the beekeeper can shake off the bees more than one hundred yards from the hive, then return the frames to the hive. The bees will return to the hive, however the laying workers will not be able to make it back. Some beekeepers have reported that on occasion, a laying worker has made it back and either entered the old hive, or entered another nearby hive and killed its queen. For this reason I believe in overkill in this situation. I will remove the frames from the hive, and drive approximately 500 yards down the road to shake them off. This ensures that no laying workers will be about to make it back to the apiary.

I have found that the best practice to avoid queen problems is to requeen with a freshly mated queen in the late summer. This queen is given time to mature going into fall, and often brings the hive out of winter very strong, and will often need splitting to avoid swarming. I have the least amount of problems with hives that are requeened in late summer.