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Thread: Maintaining a drone population

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    Administrator gavin's Avatar
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    Default Maintaining a drone population

    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?

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    Senior Member busybeephilip's Avatar
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    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.

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    Senior Member fatshark's Avatar
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    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

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    Senior Member prakel's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by gavin View Post
    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.
    Last edited by prakel; 29-08-2014 at 10:29 AM.

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    Senior Member prakel's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by fatshark View Post
    ...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.

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    Senior Member Jon's Avatar
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    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.

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    Administrator gavin's Avatar
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    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.
    Last edited by gavin; 29-08-2014 at 01:50 PM.

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    Senior Member prakel's Avatar
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    lol. On the one point, I realise that there are differences in climate, I wasn't suggesting otherwise.

    With regard to his importing bees, I covered that too:
    if we take his post at face value
    Obviously I have no knowledge of whether his bees are quite hybridised or not, but as I wasn't really making a judgement on any specific pure race I don't think that it matters either way.

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    Senior Member Jon's Avatar
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    I have about 50 drone combs and and once a colony has 5 or 6 frames covered with bees I drop a couple of combs into the colony. In an ideal world this would be early April as you have about a 6 week time lag from drone egg laid to sexually mature drone. Getting queens mated before the end of May when you live this far north is a challenge but I did manage a few this year. Last year it was nearer the end of June. We have had 4 weeks of cool wet weather in August and hardly any queens have mated but that is not for lack of drones. Last Sunday and last Tuesday were decent enough days and I came across a few apideas with eggs yesterday evening. The wasps have picked a lot of them off.

    I also came across a queenless colony with a couple of scrub queen cells in it so I gave it a frame of grafts after removing the cells. Those queens will be emerging 9th September so could mate from about the 15th. Nothing ventured and all that! First grafting I have done in about 3 weeks. Pointless in this weather as they were only starting a small number per frame.

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    Pollen, feed lots of pollen, from about Royal Welsh week (third week in July)up to when the last drones you envisage needing are at the sealed cell stage. Its a hell of an investment for patchy results IME, I'm with Prakel in that its best to do queen rearing when the bees think its best. Enough drones to mate the odd late supercedure queen is a different kettle of fish to getting consistent results with mating whole batches of grafted queens IMO.
    Last edited by mbc; 29-08-2014 at 04:31 PM.

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