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Senior Member
I think my queens mated fine. They were laying decent pattern with no gaps and there was no sign of excess drone brood.
I would blame my own losses on other factors rather than poor queen mating. It is an easy cop out to say poor mated queen, had no chance.
varroa was not a big factor in my losses either. I blame sustained poor nutrition due to bad weather and early shutdown of brood rearing in the autumn. My colonies that I lost just ran out of bees. I saved a couple of queens from colonies which were down to apidea size and these are now roaring away and laying well having been caged and introduced to a couple of frames of bees and brood. That would suggest as well that poor mating was not the problem - just lack of bees. When you have poorly mated queens they try and supersede in August and September and that did not happen.
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Senior Member
You might be right Jon
The bad weather windows might have led to mating nearer the apiary though.
The unusual thing I found was nearly all the colonies made it through but a couple became drone layers and another couple just didn't make any headway
They are still around just small
That's 5 out of 15 =1 dead(drone layer), 2 drone laying in Spring , 2 just no vigour
They are all queen issues one way or another
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Senior Member
Drone Laying queens are extremely rare in my experience. I do get the odd one but mostly I just see it with queens which go stale after too long in the apidea and they start to lay drone after about 30 days.
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Administrator
I suspect that you try harder to get the drone part of the equation right than we do.
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Senior Member
Drone laying queens seem to crop up in some years 2005 was the last one for me don't know why.
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