In the absence of a queen, the bees are reluctant to fly out of the hive and, when they arrive in the hive, carry scarce abundant eggs. In the nest you can find humped broods in 1-2 or more frames. Eggs in honeycomb cells are laid haphazardly, and some have 2-3 or more eggs. At the bottom of cells, eggs are not arranged vertically, as usual, but lie and sometimes are attached directly to the cell walls. These eggs are laid only by worker bees. They are unfertilized and develop dwarf dormice that cannot fertilize the queen.
The reason
When there is no queen and therefore no brood in the hive, in some cases the worker bees develop the ability to lay eggs within a few weeks. The cause is not essentially the absence of a queen, but the absence of brood. And the lack of brood, in turn, arises from the lack of a queen. These eggs are usually haploid (have a single set of unpaired chromosomes), and so they will all become drones.
Symptoms
The worker bees usually lay eggs not only in the worker bees' brood cells, but also in the drones' cells. They also usually lay several eggs in a single cell. Eggs laid by worker bees are usually on the wall of the cell instead of on the bottom, except in drones. If there are many drones in the hive, this is a sign of droning bees, as is the presence of several eggs in one cell.
It can happen that the queen does not lay eggs for a while, and when she starts again, she lays two eggs in some cells. But it usually stops after a day or two. Brassica bees usually lay three or four eggs in each cell. The difficulty with this is that the bees think there is a queen in the hive (because of the laying worker bees) and will not accept a new queen.
Laying worker bees are almost impossible to find in the hive among the other bees. In a full-sized hive this makes no sense – there are too many bees and too many drones among them.
Options for solving the problem
If a colony has lost a queen, but there is a mother brood, you need to monitor the emergence of a new female on the 16th day after sowing the eggs. On the 10th day after the birth of a new queen, check whether she is fertilized and present in the hive at all.
Frames from other hives are placed in queenless families with one day's seeding. As long as the workers are busy with larvae, they will not feed each other, which means they will not create bee hives and the family will remain healthy.
If you have several hives weakened by laying worker bees, and there is at least one strong hive that has a queen, put all the weak hives into the strong hive. This mixing of several beehives usually results in one good hive with a queen.
Place an unfertilized queen in the hive. It is enough to smoke the hive hard and put the uterus inside. Sometimes they accept the uterus this way, but usually they kill it.
Put the hatching brood and queen in a cage and place it in the hive with the laying worker bees. When they stop rushing to the cage and killing the emerging entourage, release the queen. This usually works, but sometimes they kill the queen.
Generally speaking, you should always focus on more than one sign that a family is likely to be orphaned, and the more signs that a family is in trouble, the more accurate the answer will be. The easiest way, if you suspect queenlessness, is to put a frame with young offspring from another successful family in the nest. If bees make queen cells on it, it's very likely that the family is queenless. The bees should be given the opportunity to raise their own queen, or they should destroy the queen cells and give a breeding queen, or put in a fertile queen. Over time, such a family can be strengthened by 1-2 frames with brood on the output.