Loads of Drones

Out yesterday with a friend inspecting his hives and came across one with numerous drones in the supers.

Thinking that there was a hole in the QE we removed the supers to find nothing apparently wrong with it ( a wired type rather than plastic). Could this be similar to the Th**nes problem but in reverse?

On lifting the QE we found a brood box absolutley bubbling over with bees - all over the tops of the frames and down the hive and so full it was difficult to estimate, but I reckon that 50% of the bees on each and every frame were drones - and very big ones too! This is a Langstroth so there were a lot of bees!

Even more surprising was that there were very few drone cells on each frame - certainly a lot less than the number of drones crawling about. I wish I had my camera with me to show this more graphically.

It was pretty clear that the hive was queenless and we removed 4 frames and replaced one with eggs and 3 with foundation only. Not sure if this was the right thing to do.

Anyone got any ideas why there should be so many drones about? We did think about laying workers and that might account for the lack of drone cells - not sure if laying workers produce drones from normal worker cells. This might also confirm the fact that hive was Q-.

Do drones move from one hive to another? Would they congregate in one particular hive ? Any thoughts or advice gratefully received.

Regards
Bill

Spadaman said:

Do drones move from one hive to another? Would they congregate in one particular hive ? Any thoughts or advice gratefully received.

Click to expand...

Yes and yes. Certain colonies attract drones who are after a meal, like colonies that are in decline from things like queenlessness, like drone laying queen, like laying workers, like colonies collapsing because of varroa or disease.

I think also that a colony containing a virgin queen would also attract drones in the 'hope' of mating with her.

My large TBH produced 1,000s of drones before it swarmed... Drones everywhere.

After the swarm, most have been evicted and are feeding the sparrows.

Yes, guard bees will let drones from other colonies in. However you have a very excessive number so unlikely they are from elsewhere.

Laying workers produce drones in worker cells but these are smaller drones than normal.

Check for laying workers and if found give that hive a frame of eggs a week for three weeks.