Drone Frames - Filled With Honey

General Bee Chat
1

I have 3 hives and each have full depth brood frames. One frame from each hive has been removed and replaced with a drone frame. There is capped honey in the frames, but the queen has not laid anything in them. Has anyone encountered this and if so were they able to overcome it and if so how was it achieved. Joh.

2

Welcome, Joh.

There’s a number of conditions that have to line up to get a frame of capped drone:

  • good nectar flow to draw out the frame - check
  • Swarming season so the workers want to make drones - they filled yours with nectar, so maybe not
  • The queen feels like laying unfertilised eggs in the drone cells - yours may not have and that led to them filling with nectar
  • Once the cells are filled with nectar there’s no chance of egg laying.

The thing with bees is that bees do what bees do. All we can do is offer them options. If they don’t choose our option, we haven’t failed, they just had other plans.

Typically, the drone removal method is only used early in the season when they’re ramping up the population. Mid summer is not the best time.

Mike

3

Hi Joh, welcome to the forum.

I haven’t detected varroa in my hives yet, however I intend on using a similar strategy, the difference being I’m going to use empty frames, 2 per hive.

Positioning the frames can play a big part in whether the bees produce workers, drones or comb filled with honey. As Mike points out, the time of season also plays a part.

Another important factor would be: how much drone brood is already within the brood? If there is already enough drone brood within the brood to suit the bees, they wont produce any more, they will either fill the drone comb with honey, or leave it empty. The use of empty frames has an advantage in that the bees will either build worker comb, drone comb or a combination of both.

The strategy is to inspect every 20 odd days I suspect, so as to remove the capped drone brood. Therefore at each inspection remove any capped honey before placing the frame in a different position if you think that will help. Also remove any other drone brood.

By keeping all the other brood frames at near 100% worker comb, we have a better chance of the bees wanting to build drone brood in the frames we allocate

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4

Thanks Mike.

My web searches after I posted the question came up with exactly the same answer as yours..

I am not confident in finding the queen to do a wash. Where she can’t be observed I will use the shake through a queen excluder method to isolate her.

Thankyou for input.

Cheers

Joh

5

Thanks Jeff for your response.

Like everything in beekeeping there can be more than one answer.

I now have another option.

Cheers

Joh

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