Worker policing and egg cannibalism

What's the worst thing that can happen during the beekeeping year?

I'm going to ignore things like foulbroods, getting struck by lightning, anaphylactic shock, earthquakes, or the zombie apocalypse.

The loss of a swarm is an annoyance, but it's hardly a disaster.

A summer storm that topples your towering, super-laden, hives is an inconvenience — a messy one — but it's still usually recoverable.

A road accident when transporting hives? Again, potentially messy, but it's amazing how many colonies survive temporary inversion without any apparent ill-effects.

Of course, the amount of mess depends upon the number of hives being transported, and how well strapped together they are. An emergency stop — to save a moronic jaywalking pheasant — with one securely sealed hive is trivial, an overturned articulated lorry stacked high with hives under a bit of netting is a different matter altogether {{1}}.

In my view, the answer is “none of the above”.

Personally, the thing I dread are laying workers.

Well, dread is too strong a term because it suggests I lay awake worrying about it.

I don't, but I do my level best to avoid them developing, and — if they do — I rarely bother investing much time or energy in rescuing the colony as bitter experience shows it's usually a waste of time and resources.

Laying workers

Laying workers exist in every hive, but are only a problem in terminally queenless and broodless colonies.

The symptoms are characteristic, and only seen in terminally queenless colonies:

• scattered bullet-shaped capped drone pupae in worker comb
• cells containing multiple eggs