Occurrence of laying workers at different honey bee colonies status.

Laying workers expressed as Workers with Activate Ovaries (WAO) having ma-ture oocytes had been studied in colonies headed with natural mated carnica queens. The results showed that the WAO were affected by the age of the queen, where it reached 0.8, 1.3 and 2.2 % for colonies headed with queens 10, 20 and 30 month old, respectively. The worker ovaries started to activate when the reached 22. 18 and 12 days from emergence for colonies headed with caged mated queens, caged virgin queens and queenless colonies, respectively. Also, when the worker's age reached 30 days, the percentages of WAO occurrence reached 3.3, 7.3 and 14.7 % for the corre-sponding colonies status, respectively. In preparing swarm boxes, when the bee-keepers failed to introduce the queens into the nuclei until two days, one week and two weeks, the WAO recorded 1.4, 4.8 and 9.2 %, respectively. In case of queen rearing, the presence of WAO was not significant until the fifth day, and then in-creased gradually to reach an average of 4.6% in the tenth day.