The curse of laying workers

“What's the greatest inconvenience for experienced beekeepers?”.If I were to ask this question I'd expect a lot of different answers; cheap supermarket (p)honey, the fubar'd differential on the Landy, the daft licensing restrictions on Api-Bioxal, and incessant spousal nagging about propolis on the sofa.What? Me?However, if I asked enough beekeepers I'd wager that some of the most 'popular' responses would be about poor queen mating and laying workers.These topics are (tenuously) related.'Poor queen mating' includes the loss of the queen on her nuptial flights. This inevitably renders the colony queenless, quite possibly terminally {{1}}. Unless the beekeeper is 'on the ball' {{2}} the colony will go on to develop laying workers.Poor queen mating occurs for a multitude of other reasons as well … lousy weather, insufficient drones, low fertility drones (or queens), house martens etc.For this reason it's a rather tricky topic to discuss definitively.Instead, I'm going to focus on the…