Part of the Bibba folklore is that native colonies retain their drones for longer than colonies of other subspecies.
Anyone got any evidence for this? I would love it to be true as it would mean that you could get a batch of pure matings by waiting until September.

The other thing I came across recently thanks to Dara Scott, who is also a speaker in Wales, is this paper which claims that a colony will start to make drones when it has 4000 workers. I am skeptical. I would have put the number far higher than that. 4000 bees would only cover about 3 frames.