Laying Worker
Lexikon
A laying worker is a worker bee that, in a colony that has been queenless for a long time, becomes an egg-laying bee itself.
A laying worker is a worker bee that, in a colony that has been queenless for a long time, becomes an egg-laying bee itself. Normally, the queen's pheromone suppresses the development of the ovaries in the worker bees. If the queen is absent for an extended period and the colony no longer finds any young brood from which to raise an emergency queen cell, the ovaries of individual worker bees develop after all, and they begin to lay.
Because laying workers were never mated, they can only lay unfertilized eggs, from which only drones hatch. This can be recognized by several eggs per cell instead of a single, centrally placed egg as with a queen, as well as by the characteristically domed cell caps of what is called humped brood, because the worker cells, which are too small, have to be built up for the larger drone larvae.
For the beekeeper, a colony with laying workers can hardly be saved anymore, because usually several worker bees are laying at the same time and the colony no longer accepts the foreign queen pheromone of a newly introduced queen. In practice, the only thing that usually helps is uniting it with a strong, queenright colony using the newspaper method, whereas simply shaking out the bees rarely succeeds, since the laying workers can fly back.