I would not know, never having used foundation or having issues with drones (or varroa).
Hillary Kearney of Girl Next Door Honey has Vimeo classes available for those interested in bee-centric, treatment free, Natural Beekeeping methods with foundationless frames and natural comb
Never hurts to be prepared 
All I got was a trailer advertising bee classes.
Hereâs an article for you by Hillary:
And
The video classes might be useful for beginners 
Cheers!
I started using foundationless frames a long time ago when at the time I thought it was a radical/maverick idea. I gave the idea away when one day I observed SHB damage in drone comb out of two hives.
The penny dropped for me as I thought about how drones donât do any work, which includes defending. I realized that where the large areas of drone comb are, there is also lots of newly emerged drones on those combs & in that general area. Therefore SHBâs are able to crawl under those newly emerged drones, unhindered & thus able to deposit eggs at the base of the pre emerge drones.
I find that by using properly fitted wax foundation, I donât get those large areas of drone comb. I get a strong colony of workers in the deal.
A strong colony of workers has so many advantages, too numerous to mention.
This is my lesson on foundation vs foundationless.
You are generous with your knowledge and expertise Jeff.
I do believe that there is no one right way to do things. Luckily, we do not have to worry about SHB here in Seattle, as of yet. But it does seem that there must be a reason that the queen/hive prefers a certain amount of drones, whether itâs for mating or hive cooling, not for me to disagree.
Thank you Tracey 
Itâs not the queenâs decision to make plenty of drones, itâs the colonies decision. She just lays the eggs.
A colony wants to make more drones at the same time as there is likely to be virgin queens out there needing to get mated. The more drones that a colony can afford to produce, the better chance that colony has of passing on itâs genes. Thatâs basically it in a nutshell.
Youâll notice that a very weak colony wont produce any drones until such times as the worker population reaches a certain level. Each colony will have a different threshold as to what that level is.
A newly hived swarm will only build worker comb initially. That colony wont start building drone comb until it reaches that threshold.
Yes, the bees decide. The queen is just there to lay eggs.
Look how quickly they know sheâs missing and start replacing her.
When the colony decides it is ready to reproduce they abuse their queen. They nudge her, they climb on her and tap her, constantly keeping her on the move. They donât feed her enough so that her laying slows and she gets thinâŚthen they push her out of the hive to fly with them. She is an unwilling participant in all this and when the new colony is strong they often replace her.
Dr Catherine Thompson has published a paper here in the UK on the Health and Status of the Feral Honey Bee She concludes that most of the feral colonies she examined are closely related to neighbouring beekeepersâ colonies and that most of these colonies are not surviving but collapsing and locations being repopulated.
http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/5211/1/CorrectedThesis3.pdf
Yes indeed. They are under pressure. They need to get going.
I have both though I am going to phase out my free drawn comb. Iâm not keeping pet bees or bees to âsave the beesâ , I really want some honey, though I am really mindful of looking after them to my best ability. Honey seasons are strange here. I havenât had a good crop for three years because of the weather but in a good year itâs nice to have enough to tide me over the lean ones and to sell some
Hi Dee & I apologize to @BeePeeker for including the word âFREEâ, I took it out. I wrongly thought that the information in the last 2 links had to be paid for like the first one.
No worries 
And I amended my statement that âthe queen decidesâ to queens/hive, as I was referring to the whole colony.
Another interesting site on wild bees, and this one also features pseudoscorpions 
Thatâs amazing! The bees take the pseudo scorpions with them when they swarm?! Deliberately??!
We have a range of these micro scorpions in Australia- but I donât know if we have any that cohabit with bees 
+ = 
I thought so too. Psuedoscorpion/bee cohabitation seems to be a good fit. I did a little research and found out a bit more:
We have them too in the UK
But I think Iâve been warned off
Let others join the conversation
This topic is clearly important to you â youâve posted more than 23% of the replies here
Are you sure youâre providing adequate time for other people to share their points of view, too?
Donât take it personally. We shouldnât let AI rule us, and I still love you! 
It doesnât come from a human moderator, it is an automated message based on some computer algorithms which donât apply to you, me, Jeff and many others. 
If the micro dose kills 90% of the mites, that means 10% can tolerate the micro dose of Lithium Chloride.
Assuming that 10% go out & breed, that means their progeny will be resistant to the micro dose.
Next time the dose will need to be increased. 10% might survive the increased dose. You can see where Iâm heading. That 10% will breed. The dose will have to be increased again.
In the end youâll have Varroa mites that are completely resistant to Lithium Chloride.
Is there anything we can do now with our own bee hives or colonies in Australia, to reduce the likelihood of varroa becoming established (other than inspection and identification type things)?
dee- ignore that âhintâ. When i was studying Microsoft word used to highlight paragraphs I wrote and tell me âParagraph overly long- consider revisingâ. It used to worry me until Iâd pick up a book by a well known author and see many paragraphs that were much longer. Word doesnât know what itâs talking about⌠literally.
That would be the best option, but given our global community with modern travel, it seems unlikely that any measures will work on long (century+) timescales.
As a bit of perspective, I spent much more than a decade worrying about Varroa more than 20 years ago in the UK. We were paranoid about it, running around like headless chickens looking for it and worrying about what to do.
All I can say is that Varroa is like an unknown medical diagnosis. It is terrifying until you face it personally. Once you have dealt with it a few times, it is still a concern, but you know its weaknesses, and its strengths. As long as you dance the correct steps, you can stay ahead of it. It isnât hard, but you have to stay vigilant and do a couple of extra things each season.
SHB was equally terrifying to me until I found it in my hives. It is still a pest (literally), but it no longer gives me nightmares. We can do this, and the bees can do it without us too, just probably with less anxiety but more loss of life in total numbers. 
Thanks Dawn.
With so many varroa free islands around the globe, my thoughts turn to them as possibilities for experimentation. Orkney, Isle of Man, Flinders, Kangaroo, Rottnest and so on. There must be thousands of such nicely isolated islands around the globe currently varroa free that would be ideal.