So I understand that one of the reasons foundation is used is to reduce the number of drones a colony produces, is that correct? That drones were considered a drain on a honey producing hive? What is the current thought on this by various members of the beekeeping community?
I ask because I found queen cells in one of my hives the other day and had to do a rush split. I couldn't find the queen so I used the "Shake and brush everyone into one deep, put a queen excluder on and put another deep full of brood on top (with all the queen cells), then split after the nurses went up on the brood" method. I was in a hurry, and out of lids, so I just put a hive bottom on top. I was feeding some nucs I had made today and lifted the "lid" on that hive and there were bees three deep on the excluder that I had forgotten to remove in my rush. They were all drones. Apparently, they exited at the bottom, but tried coming back in at the top and couldn't get back in because of the excluder.
So what do you think I should do with this batch of boys? Remove the excluder and let the hive keep them? Or destroy them?
JC
As with everything else beekeeping, there is no single mindset on drones. I let my hives make them, they want to so I let them and this has been a red letter year for them. Many beekeepers, including myself are seeing a much larger than average drone population. Yes, foundation was mainly created to control cell size for the control of drones.
I let mine do what they want. My strongest hive has drones everywhere. Hatched drones, capped drone brood, drone larvae. My weaker hive has very few, most of the drone comb is empty. Maybe they all went next door.
bees do things for a reason. if there is a year that they make lots of drones, i figure they know what they need. last year that i had tons of drones turned out to be a really good year. this year i have a lot of drones and so far, it looks like the bees are doing really well...it's early.
there's a fine line between managing and trying to control.
My guess is the machine that makes foundation is also much simpler to build/design if all the cell sizes are the same size. However just because the foundation is worker cell size, does not mean the bees always draw it out as worker cells. I often find foundation re-worked into drone cells on the bottom ΒΌ of some frames.
No matter what you do, the bees find places to make drones in the spring. I have been experimenting with drone culling this year as a control strategy for varroa mites, but I'm questioning how useful this is since they are still raising drones elsewhere in the hive.
I would say let the boys live :)
>So I understand that one of the reasons foundation is used is to reduce the number of drones a colony produces, is that correct? That drones were considered a drain on a honey producing hive? What is the current thought on this by various members of the beekeeping community?
Bees have a threshold of drones they desire. If you remove drones or drone comb they will spend resources on more drones that otherwise would have been spend raising more workers or making more honey. I would leave them. The theory that you could reduce the number of drones by limiting drone cells was pretty well disproven by Clarence Collison more than a decade ago:
Levin, C.G. and C.H. Collison. 1991. The production and distribution of drone comb and brood in honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) colonies as affected by freedom in comb construction. BeeScience 1: 203-211.