Valli, removing drone brood is a recognised part of integrated pest management.
To quote the national bee unit "Current scientific data indicates that the removal of sealed drone brood will slow mite population growth, in a bee colony, by about 50%. Though it’s use alone will not prevent a colony from being overwhelmed, it is an important tool, within an integrated approach, to Varroa control"
As this is an international forum it is useful for novice beekeepers, who have to contend with varroa, to know this.
I’m afraid virgin queens have little choice in their successful suitors. They are poor flyers in comparison to drones which are sophisticated flying machines. The fittest fastest drone will catch the queen, mate, leaving behind his endophallus which is then removed by the next in line.
Dexter, you are lucky that despite no intervention from you your bees are disease free. That’s not the case for many, could I say, the majority of us.
The fact that you do not cull drone brood (and here I must iterate that it is only SOME drone brood) doesn’t make it an unrecognised method of varroa control.
I’d like to suggest too that many a beekeeper’s best attempts at rearing easy to handle bees has been ruined by his neighbours’ drones from hellish hives.
My iphone has run out of juice so no video. I took a pile of pics and am posting a selection of them here. I saw lots of hive beetles but I think I saw both larvae and capped brood. Still plenty of space for the girls to work on so no need for the super yet.
I also had a good look on this frame, it appears to be fully drawn out and with the spread of pollen down to the bottom bar it appears to be one of the outter frames in your hive. When you get chance, post a few more like this one (e.g. high resolution) directly from your camera.
Just had a look at your video Bob, leave it for another week or two, seeing that you are running starter strips, it is going to take a little longer for the comb to be drawn out to a point where the queen is happy to begin laying. Be patient. Also, I saw you were hoping to split this hive in a month, my advice would be to wait until next spring, there are too few bees and the hive is young and vulnerable. Wait until you have so many bees that you can barely see the frames.
Hi Bob, you certainly have some sealed brood there, no problems at all there, however, sadly I think I’m also looking at some SHB damage. It looks like the bees are cleaning it up. Am I seeing gaps right through the comb? Those sunken caps aren’t good. You have a few beetle there in some of those cells. Sorry to be the bearer of this kind of news.
Thanks Jeff, I had seen chewed out comb and lots of SHB as I went through the hive. I have two traps in the top of the hive. I swapped one out today so I could look through the oil and get an idea how many had been caught. Lots. Haven’t counted them yet. I don’t know if SHB stick around after a nest has died out but there had been a bees nest in a tree about 30 metres from where my new little hive is now. I don’t know when the nest died out but the bees were gone six months ago. The SHB could be coming from there I guess.
I saw bees moving dead larvae out of the frames and I saw quite a number of SHB in the frames themselves.
Not sure what the best strategy is right now. Sit tight and hope for the best?
Jeff beat me to it… your queen is laying fine, that is good news. The bad news is something is not right with some of the capped cells and Jeff may well be on the money here. There are quite a few beetles on your frames, more than I am comfortable with. If your eyes are up to it, use a matchstick to open a sunken cell or two see what’s going on in there. It may well be beetle larva or something else. Read up on the pests and diseases, especially EFB & AFB, if the larva is dead, be prepared to use the stick to perform a ropiness test. Better to be sure, just in case.
What measures have you put in place for Small Hive Beetle? We could offer a few suggestions to help you get on top of it.
What I would do, I’ve bee there before, is cut out the comb with the damage only leaving the undamaged comb. Catch & squash every beetle in the hive. Scrape the sides & floor of the hive clean. Make sure you place the frames in position, being careful not to squash any bees & leave a bee space between the frames. Also make sure the remaining brood is flanked by frames without brood. That is, don’t put the brood next to the side of the box. Check each frame daily or even twice daily for additional beetle, naturally squash them. You can put the damaged comb in the freezer. It’s important that you don’t leave any dead bees in the hive, especially wedged between frames. My vinyl mat on top of my frames works for me in that it gives the beetle somewhere to hide, then the bees propolize them in. Newly laid beetle eggs looks like blow fly eggs, only smaller. So watch out for them on the comb that doesn’t look damaged. Good luck with that Bob, cheers
Its still very early days with your beetle. As I said earlier check those sunken cells, you need to know what the problem, i.e. SHB or disease
And as Jeff has said, squash as many beetle as possible and use tweezers to get the beetles hiding in the cells. Additionally, put a tray of water under your entrance to catch any beetle larva exiting the hive and order a couple of apithor online. Put one on your bottom board and the other on top of your frames.
Hi Valli, in the context of my advice to Bob. He is talking about doing a split in 4 weeks time. I advised him not to do it until he had 6-8 frames of bees & brood. Generally bees will build worker comb in the beginning, when they feel they have enough, depending on the season, they will build drone comb on the outside frames. Assuming Bob did an equal split, he would put 4 frames in each box to start new hives. It would be unproductive to leave large areas of drone comb on any of those 4 frames. If you want the bees to build up naturally, they will. When the bees have sufficient workers, then, depending on the season they will construct drone comb for the queen to lay in. It is the colony that decides how many drones they want, not the queen. The queen will never lose concentration. I have seen a weak colony that needs to build up it’s worker population tear drone larvae out of cells as if they were rag dolls. When that happens, the hive still ends up with empty drone comb. It’s best to remove that drone comb early so the colony can build up their worker population before concentrating on producing drones in their own time. The time & effort of the bees removing the drone larvae can be better spent building up the worker population. I hope this is clear.
could someone with some image editing abilities circle the sunken cells you’re referring to. I’m not really making it out with this untrained eye. Hopefully it would be helpful for others too.
This is our famed Ron Hoskins.
It is now thought that rather than being the “hygienic” that they are (the bees can sense infected larvae and pull them out, thus stopping that varroa’s breeding cycle) the bees have a deformed wing virus variant which causes no harm.
(deformed wing virus is one of the viruses that are passed to the bees by varroa. The predominant type causes shrunken deformed wings and sluggish behaviour, eventually colony collapse)
This benign variant is thought to displace the disease causing type.
Dexter may well be experiencing something similar though I think he has bees from lots of sources as he catches swarms…he’ll correct me if I’m wrong.
It might be interesting if he monitored the varroa for a week in the season and let us know what sort of loads the bees are coping with (he has said he doesn’t look for varroa)
These sorts of variants do crop up and as Packham says, they may be the salvation of our bees.
