I'm slowly/informally regressing 2 of my hives to natural comb, using standard deep Lang frames (Pierco), from which I basically cut out the entire middle, leaving only a strip around the edges. I've been occasionally swapping out regular frames for these modified ones all season. Seems to be going well - especially if I put a new (modified) frame between 2 existing ones... they'll build it up with comb very quickly. Very cool, and these hives seem very happy.
I saw something last night I wasn't expecting though. One of these hives is 2 deeps... probably about 8 frames have been modified and these sit amongst the remaining regular frames. What I noticed was that most of the brood on the modified frames was drone brood! I have not noticed this before. The regular frames were just about all worker brood, but the modified ones were almost all drones. Anybody seen this before?
Thanks!
Hi Diggity,
Not weird at all...the bees are drawing drone comb because they have been given the opportunity to. If you remove this comb, they will build more. Just move the drone brood to the outsides of the hive body and give them more modified frames. When they are satisfied with the number of drones they have ("drone right"), they will build worker comb again.
Keep the frames with the smaller worker cells in the center of the broodnest and keep rotating the frames with predominantly larger cells to the outsides of the boxes and up into the upper boxes. They can also be used for nectar storage.
Most of our frames are foundationless using jumbo popsicle sticks glued horizontally in the groove of the top bar as comb guides. We often see frames in the center that are so uniform with small cells that they look almost like they were drawn from foundation. Other frames will have a good percentage of drone comb. We've noticed that because the bees can draw drone comb in the frames, we never get burr comb.
Drones are often underappreciated by us humans...the bees know why they want them and when.
Ramona
This exactly what happened to me when I started replacing foundation frames with foundationless. Ramona has said exactly what I would.
Don't worry, you're doing it right.
Great, thanks for the reply! That's very good information and I'm so glad to hear it's normal. :)
Thanks!
-Diggity