When a bee colony fails to raise a queen after a split, laying workers can take over—and that usually means trouble. In this short, I share how I rescued a queen-less hive full of laying workers using the old “dump and switch” method.

✅ This approach saved the colony within 1 day by reorienting foragers and successfully introducing an initially caged queen.

The current conventional method for fixing Laying Workers involved weekly introduction of new brood frames for at least 3 weeks and, thereby, wasting significant resources.

I’m Boris the Bee Guy from ForestBeehive Apiary in central Maine. Whether you’re a beginner beekeeper, hobbyist, or a beekeeping enthusiast, you’ll appreciate this practical method for dealing with laying workers and failed splits.

But first, why even do splits?

In summer, strong bee colonies often swarm—that’s how new colonies are born.

The beekeepers use splits (aka artificial swarms) to mimic swarms without losing the bees.

This spring I split two strong survivor colonies.

With splits essentially assists a bee colony in its natural reproductive process, much like a doula supports childbirth.

The 1st split succeeded and in 4 weeks – the queen-less side raised its own virgin queen who then returned from her mating flight and started laying.

2nd split wasn’t so lucky – the new virgin queen never returned from her mating flight – probably eaten by a bird or something.

That colony ended up with laying workers, and only produced drones.

Fixing laying workers is tough, but I used an old and reliable “dump and switch” method.

1. Dump
I shook all the bees out about 40” away,

2. Switch (or swap)

I swapped the laying workers hive’s spot with a strong queen-right colony hive and set it up with a new caged queen, 2 frames of brood, and a few honeycomb frames.

The dumped bees flew back to their old spot, but after hive switching that spot had a strong queen-right colony and its guard bees accepted most of the bees except for laying workers who smell different.

And the old laying workers hive with the new caged queen and brood got all the foragers from the swapped queen right hive.