Laying worker bee

A laying worker bee is an ordinary worker honey bee that begins laying unfertilized eggs, a condition that typically arises after a colony has lost its queen. Because a laying worker has never mated, only drones develop from her eggs, with rare exceptions, and a colony that comes to rely solely on laying workers cannot survive. Even in a healthy, queenright colony roughly one percent of workers have developed ovaries, but chemical signals from the queen and the brood normally suppress them from laying; the shift to a colony of laying workers typically unfolds over the weeks following the loss of the queen to swarming or death.