Description
ABOUT CLAUDIA
Claudia Roller is a researcher at Dr. David Tarpy's the Apiculture Laboratory at North Carolina State University. She coordinates USDA-NIFA Research and Extension Experiential Learning for undergraduates there. She also conducts independent research on queenless colonies. Before joing the lab, Claudia worked for several years with a 150-colony sideliner beekeeping business.
(Note: MCBA also funded an NCSU researcher in Dr. Tarpy’s lab, Molly Carlson, in 2025.)
While Claudia hails from Tucson, Arizona, she majored in biology at Goucher College in Towson, Maryland, so she spent almost five years in our state.
DETAILS ABOUT THE "LAYING WORKER" DILEMMA
How we currently deal with laying workers
Currently, beekeepers addressing laying workers have low-success methods which are destructive of resources and bees.
One involves shaking the nurse bees, the presumed population of laying workers, out on the ground away from the apiary. The idea is they are write-offs, we cannot trust them, as a population, to not lay drones. They may be able to bid their way into other colonies in the apiary.
Another involves taking a capped and open brood comb from another colony, adding it to the afflicted one. The hope is brood pheromone will suggest to the laying workers that there is an active queen present.
A third involves introducing a new queen. But too often that queen is not accepted.
These methods don't reliably work and are resource- and time-expensive.
Some science: the research Claudia is pursuing
Claudia's innovation is what she calls the "Banana Split/Combo". She does not repeatedly introduce purchased queens into laying worker colonies. Instead, she combines the failing colony with a small, queen-right single deep colony. She cages the queen during the introduction. She separates the two colonies with newspaper and a queen excluder. The queen-right colony goes on top of the laying worker colony, above the honey supers.
Even when the laying worker colony is as much as four times the size of the small, queen-right colony, the method succeeds.
Are the laying workers’ ovaries reverting back to a non-reproductive state? Is it the presence of open brood? The queen’s daughters? Specific pheromonal combinations? Or was it simply the management choices made to create separation and protect the queen during the combination process?
We know that queen pheromone (Queen Mandibular Pheromone, QMP) alone is not enough to prevent or revert laying workers, but it does suppress or delay ovary activation. This suggests that brood pheromones may play a major role in restoring order to a laying worker colony, as they are a secondary fecundity signal of the queen. This project will test which factors are truly necessary to rescue a laying worker colony, using both field trials based on the Banana Combo method and lab cage work to examine certain experimental parameters in a hyper-controlled condition.
