4 days post swarming my hive has an abundance of drone bees.
On Monday my hive swarmed, and unfortunately I lost maybe 70% of my worker bees with the old queen.
A few things to note.
- I moved a whole colony from a Langstroth hive into my Flow Hive 2+ on 27 Feb with 9 of the original Langstroth frames that were full of honey reserves, brood and pollen.
- I added 1 foundation-less Flow Hive frame, which post swarm I have seen the bees built out entirely with drone cells. To start I added in the side, but after the first 2 weeks they had no touched it. So I moved it in 4 frames from the side. That worked, they jumped to work and fully built it out top to bottom side to side, only they build drone cells.
Was it a mistake? The original Langstroth foundation frames are all built out with worker bee size cells. I read that a hive generally likes about 10% to be for drones, That would make sense that they then thought 1 frame out of the 10 should be for drones. Prior to swarming there were very few drones, maybe post winter they hadn‘t yet built up. But now, post swarm, its crazy how many there are, like an invasion of drones and the caps are fast disappearing of the capped honey food reserves. The drones are unmistakeable, now I know what they look like and how they sound compared to the females. There were so few before the swarm that I wasn‘t sure, now I know that is because I‘m not sure there were any.
It’s been a stressful week working though the aftermath of the swarm. Yesterday I removed 9 queen cells, and left 3 of the biggest.
I’m leaning towards going with the “flow“ and trusting the bees with millions of years of evolution know how to handle it. I‘m hoping there are enough worker bees to assert themselves and kick the excess drones out. Do they do that? Post swarm in the hive has a very different look and feel to pre swarm.
I‘m curious, because while doing the inspection yesterday I noted there were a lot of capped drone cells yet to open. To be fair, there are also a lot of capped worker bee cells.
I‘ll be curious to see how they build out the next foundation-less frames when I cycle out some of the Langstroth ones. If they build more drone cells I‘ll be really concerned.