Maintaining a drone population

[gavin]

Do the queen rearers amongst us do anything special to maintain drones in their apiary as the season declines?

Bees around here have been throwing out drones for weeks and many colonies don't have any left. A fortnight ago I shook out a drone layer and was impressed by the number therein at a time when the last few were being harassed by workers elsewhere. That was the association apiary where we're not doing queen raising this year.

Last Sunday I was at our isolated mating site and saw just a few drones in the couple of drone producing colonies there, and they weren't looking welcome. However yesterday I heard from our collaborators on the site that their colonies still had lots of drones and so I've gone from pessimism about the chances for the current queens in Apideas and in cell raising colonies back to guarded optimism again. Their colonies include a queen raiser.

So what do folk do in seasons like this to maintain their drones? Avoid the issue by shortening the queen raising season? Keep feeding? Q-less cell raising on site? Deliberately leave queenless hives on site to provide drone hostels?

[busybeephilip]

I just call it an end to queen rearing and let nature take its course. I had one box which had what appeared to be more drones than workers where the queen decided to fail, after adding a new queen in the next day or two there was a heap of dead drones on the ground in front. i'm to busy (50 boxes) treating for varroa, emergency feeding and making preparations for winter feeding.

Now if you were using II, then you can harvest semen from your favourite drone/s, put in storage and continue rearing queens for another month.

[fatshark]

I either stop (which I've done this year) or take my chances (which I did last year). Like you, drones in most of my colonies - even those set up to generate lots - are pretty thin on the ground. I've given up this year due to lack of time though, not lack of drones.

Although I should probably start a different thread I'll stick with SBAi tradition and ask a vaguely related question ... I've switched largely to foundationless frames this season. One of the characteristics of these is that the colonies tend to generate significantly more drones. Instead of the odd patch around the edge of frames you might normally see, these colonies have one or two complete frames of almost solid drone comb. I think Jon introduced the foundationless frames to SBAi and that he has made a similar observation.

So, those of you who rear queens, like to be selective about your drone population and use foundationless frames ... what do you do?

Sorry Gavin

[prakel]

...One of the characteristics of these is that the colonies tend to generate significantly more drones. Instead of the odd patch around the edge of frames you might normally see, these colonies have one or two complete frames of almost solid drone comb. I think Jon introduced the foundationless frames to SBAi and that he has made a similar observation.

So, those of you who rear queens, like to be selective about your drone population and use foundationless frames ... what do you do?

It's several years since we bought foundation and we probably won't go back to using it until such time as the bees buy themselves an efficient press/mill. What we generally see is drone comb spread across most/all frames in the brood chamber rather than individual combs full of drone.

I can see how it might be an issue if you were targeting certain drone mothers however I also reckon that if we're doing that then we'd be establishing sites with selected drone colonies anyway and moving the other one's to more distant apiaries so greater drone population in the individual hive is less important than the location.

[Jon]

My bees never throw drones out as early as July. As an importer of NZ Carnica and more, ITLD never misses a change to have a pop at native bees so take that with a pinch of salt. I had a couple of queens start to lay in October last year.
Any colony which is queenless or has a virgin will retain its drones.
Some of mine have very few drones at the moment but others still have hundreds.
If stores get low or the weather is bad your drones will get kicked out earlier.

[gavin]

Thanks folks.

I suspect that the climate differences between E Scotland and the Jurassic coast may have had something to do with the difference between Murray's bees and yours, Prakel. Besides, Murray's 'native types' are likely quite hybridised.

I have a bundle of grafted cells going to the mating site at the start of next week. I think that I'll remove the queens from the two drone colonies under my control and put a cell in each - that should encourage these two to keep some of the drones in the apiary for perhaps the next 3 weeks or so, longer if the queens don't mate, and at least as long as the sisters in the Apideas in the apiary (the last batch of grafts for the year) will need them. Happy to report back and even happier if it ends up adding something to Jon's talk in Llangollen! Currently these two colonies have very few drones but the colonies alongside are apparently well-provisioned with them, for now.

As for foundationless - sounds good. This year I tried drone foundation for the first time, and certainly if you put it in at the right time around the spring broodnest it works well. Whichever you use timing is important if you want a big slab of drone brood, wait until they are feeling that they have a decent worker population under their belts, as it were. If you are in the business of suppressing drone production in less favoured colonies and replacing with better genetics, then having your drone brood focused onto single frames will be useful.

[prakel]

So what do folk do in seasons like this to maintain their drones? Avoid the issue by shortening the queen raising season? Keep feeding? Q-less cell raising on site? Deliberately leave queenless hives on site to provide drone hostels?

I don't actually do anything. In the same way that I'm no fan of starting to raise cells early I can't see that keeping drones going artificially would fit my ideas about what's good for the bees.

That said, I never seem to have an issue with early destruction of drones, in my case I wonder whether it's partly due to the use of natural comb however back in 2012 ITLD was writing on the bkf about his native type bees throwing drones out in July while ours were able to make good use of a fine weather-window in September so maybe, if we take his post at face value, your local bees are more inclined to this behaviour.

Carl Jurica in his book mentions that he stops some late queens from mating and keeps them through winter as a source of early drones the following year. There's some good tips and thoughts in his book but I don't reckon that that's one of them.

[lindsay s]

Carl Jurica in his book mentions that he stops some late queens from mating and keeps them through winter as a source of early drones the following year. There's some good tips and thoughts in his book but I don't reckon that that's one of them.

Any colonies with drone laying queens that I’ve come across in the springtime are usually in a pretty poor state. I find it hard to believe that a dwindling colony with old workers and no nurse bees could produce good quality drones for mating. On the other hand he maybe has a way around this? This is my layman’s point of view.

[prakel]

I find it hard to believe that a dwindling colony with old workers and no nurse bees could produce good quality drones for mating. On the other hand he maybe has a way around this? This is my layman’s point of view.

Totally agree with you.

I've just skimmed through the section to remind myself what it was that he actually wrote. I can't see any tricks mentioned, not even a recommendation to add worker brood etc which is something I would have thought an absolute necessity to make the plan work. The reasoning behind this apparent omission may have been to stop the production of undersized drones as he does mention that he fills the hive with drone comb culled from other colonies during the course of the summer but I'd have thought that the worker brood could still be added, with the aid of an excluder.

On the one hand he clearly states that he's running a business as a queen producer so I'm inclined to think that he must have had 'something' but on the other hand I don't buy into the method at all; it just doesn't feel right to me and anyway I don't have any use for early drones.

[gavin]

Couldn't that approach work simply to provide a drone-friendly home for drones raised in better times in a colony headed by a fertile queen? If winter holds them in the state they were in during autumn, then the colonies might emerge in spring with still-viable drones which were fed well in late summer or early autumn. Presumably they would largely need only carbohydrate overwinter. Would drones raised in, say, August, survive to April if the colony was predisposed to feed and welcome the adult drones?

If that was true then culling drone combs from several colonies to place in a colony without a properly fertile queen could indeed be a reservoir of a useful diversity of drone genotypes, just what you need in queen raising.

OK, here's another question. If I was to remove the fertile queen in a colony now that had already largely jetisoned its drones (and replace her with a ripe cell), might that colony welcome and host the drone population drifting in from other colonies in the apiary? For this, I'm not thinking of overwintering drones, just ensuring they're not kicked out from these other colonies and lost in the next few weeks.

These things interest me as a short season of queen raising is OK when you don't need many queens, but if you have limited resources and a need for as many queens as possible (either you're going commercial or would like to serve a large community of LA members) then extending the season at both ends is attractive.

PS Excellent discussion so far folks! Thanks ....