I returned home from being away for a month to find a laying worker has been raising drones in my Flow frames! Does anyone have suggestions on how to clean that out? Just wait until the hive is in order and then let the bees do it?
There will be hundreds of laying workers.
Have you got any other hives?
If so smoke the bees well so they fill up with sugar and tip them out onto a hive roof ten feet or so away from the other hives then take all the old hive completely away.
They will beg their way in as they have honey. The brood pheromones in their new home will stop them laying and the few that do lay will have their eggs eaten by the housekeeping bees.
If you haven’t any other hives then I’m afraid the colony is doomed as they will not accept a new queen. The only way you might re-queen is to introduce frames of open brood. You may need to introduce up to three or four, waiting till the cells are capped before adding the other. Eventually they might make queen cells…then you remove them and add your new mated queen…Takes ages though and hardly worth it.
Take the frames out and get rid of the drone brood yourself.
The best thing to do would be to put an excluder in and wait for the drones to hatch before harvesting.
Also it would be best to brush all the bees off the Flow™ combs to make sure the queen is underneath the excluder before putting the Flow™ box back on. Hope this helps.
But what about cleaning out the frames…thoughts on that? Just let the bees do it?
They won’t clean out the cocoons. You’ll have to do that I’m afraid.
Did you not have an excluder? what caused the laying worker to lay in the flow hives? I am new so just curious.