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Author Topic: Drones already?  (Read 1047 times)

Offline The Bix

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Drones already?
« on: March 15, 2011, 12:50:28 pm »
My petite wife again hefting those 10-frame deeps due to my temporary disability, helped me do another inspection on one of my hives yesterday.  I was surprised when she started pulling frames to find drone larvae and a drone crawling around inside the hive.  Since I am at an elevation of ~6,200' MSL and just south of the 40th parallel I was surprised (perhaps showing my ignorance) to see the drone and drone brood already.  I was immediately concerned that I was queenless, but I did see plenty of capped brood, larvae next to the capped brood and just laid eggs next to the larva.  I doubt this is a laying worker though because there was only one egg per cell and they were placed at the bottom of the cell right where they should be.  I didn't keep the hive open long enough to search for the queen.  Thoughts?

Offline Brian D. Bray

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Re: Drones already?
« Reply #1 on: March 15, 2011, 09:35:41 pm »
Sounds like things are fairly normal, it is not unusual to seen the 1st eggs of the season be drones, they are needed after all in the case of queen failure and the bees have to make an emergency queen.  I think you'll see a normal brood pattern in the near future unless the queen was not properly mated to begin with, which might make her a drone layer after a hard winter.

I don''t  worry to much about drone cells unless most or all of what I see are drone cellsespecially rows of drone caps in the worker cells. after the 1st of April.  Also don't worry about queen cups, but with the advent of queen cells I'll split a nuc out of the hive taking the old queen.
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