Maintaining a drone population

[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.