drone brood in honey super

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islayhawk

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Checking my hive today I found drone brood in the honey super. The brood is in one frame directly above the centre of the brood nest in the brood box and numbers about 30-40 cells, some with larvae and some sealed but no signs of eggs. Queen excluder is ok and there is plenty of space in the brood box. Queen was seen in the brood box . If she can get through the excluder why is it only drone brood I am finding and not eggs or worker brood
 
My guess would be that you have had some laying workers in the super as they can only lay infertile eggs. If your queen had got into the super you would have most likely found worker brood. However, that is quite a lot of drone brood, how long have you had the queen, is she getting old and therefore not producing enough queen substance to suppress laying workers? Also what type of foundation do you have in the super, is it worker or drone size and could the queen have nipped up there? If you have 'kink' in a queen excluder a queen can fit through a gap.
 
The frame with the drone brood is drone cells. However the super also has worker cells but they have not been touched. Should I consider caging the queen in the hive and dumping the bees a distance away to get rid of any possible laying workers. The Queen is only a year old and is laying very well with BIAS in the brood box
 
I think it is very unlikely to be Drone laying workers if you have a mated queen laying queen with open brood in main brood box

so i think you have a small scrub queen that is able to pass through the Qex and lay in the super, which the workers often draw out as drone cells
 
I think it is very unlikely to be Drone laying workers if you have a mated queen laying queen with open brood in main brood box


There are always multiple laying workers even in a queenright hive

"Anarchistic bees" are ever present but usually in small enough numbers to not cause a problem and are simply policed by the workers UNLESS they need drones. The number is always small as long as ovary development is suppressed.

See page 9 of "The Wisdom of the Hive"

"Although worker honey bees cannot mate, they do possess ovaries and can produce viable eggs; hence they do have the potential to have male offspring (in bees and other Hymenoptera, fertilized eggs produce females while unfertilized eggs produce males). It is now clear, however, that this potential is exceedingly rarely realized as long as a colony contains a queen (in queenless colonies, workers eventually lay large numbers of male eggs; see the review in Page and Erickson 1988). One supporting piece of evidence comes from studies of worker ovary development in queenright colonies, which have consistently revealed extremely low levels of development. All studies to date report far fewer than 1 % of workers have ovaries developed sufficiently to lay eggs (reviewed in Ratnieks 1993; see also Visscher 1995a). For example, Ratnieks dissected 10,634 worker bees from 21 colonies and found that only 7 had moderately developed egg (half the size of a completed egg) and that just one had a fully developed egg in her body."

http://www.bushfarms.com/beeslayingworkers.htm
 
Agree with Hivemaker and Mr Seeley. Had a chat with Tom about this when he first spoke at the INIB conference a few years ago.
I wouldn't say that I see this all the time but the odd colony does produce a fair bit of drone brood in the supers. Interestingly, it tends to be in relatively compact clusters which goes against observations that laying workers lay in a very random, dispersed pattern. My other observation is that the workers tend to stop rasing their own drone brood in the supers once the Spring flow is ended.
It is a little un-nerving when you first encounter it. In my case I first thought the queen had got up into the supers.... not nice if like me you rmainly run drone foundation in the supers.
When I encounter a wee bit of drone brood in the supers, I tend to run the flat of my hive tool over the capped cells. The bees clear up the drone brood at that point.
 
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I personally would not do anything with this colony other than brush the hatched drones into the brood box when doing an inspection so that they did not get stuck in the queen excluder. As there are no eggs in the super that drone brood should be out of the way before any honey is taken off, and since the queen is laying well I would not disrupt the colony.
 
Workers move the eggs around. It happens sometimes if you use drone foundation in the supers directly above the brood box. Use one with worker foundation above the box and it won't happen again.
 
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Workers move the eggs around. It happens sometimes if you use drone foundation in the supers directly above the brood box. Use one with worker foundation above the box and it won't happen again.

:yeahthat:
E
 
As others have said it's not unusual. I have encountered it a few times.
I usually just leave them to get on with it. The drones tend to fly out when I do an inspection and then the cells get filled with honey.
I've even seen a few QC's in supers !!
 

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