Help with Drone colony

[wightbees]

I am wanting to try some things out this yr and this is on my list.
How do i build up drone colonies ? I know ,or think i need a drone laying Q but
without lots of nurse bees and so on the colony will not last long.
So how do you keep a drone colony up together.
The reasons for wanting to do this are for Q breeding latter down the line but i need to practise first

 

[Finman]

.
You have 4 hives. It is better to join them to the nextdoor neighbour.
Take drone brood and the drone layer away .

 

[wightbees]

Hi Finman
I don't have a drone layer,lol
Have another read, or is it me who's confused lol

 

[RoofTops]

Put one or two shallow frames in the brood chamber, not right in the middle or on the outside or next to each other. The bees will draw down comb from them and it will be drone comb. I don't know why it is always drone comb, but it is. You can also try a full sized frame with a starter strip but a shallow frame works fine.

In my experience you must be very hot on varroa control to the extent of being prepared to forget the honey from the drone colonies and treat with thymol or formic acid as soon as you see mite levels building up. Raising drones is great for breeding varroa.

Drone raising needs to be started well before queen rearing. I can't remember the exact times but the drones will be 24 days before they emerge and then they need to be at least a couple of weeks old to be sexually mature so that means the queen needs drone comb to lay in about 6 weeks before you are going to be wanting drones for mating. This means putting the shallow frames in at least 8 weeks and probably earlier. March sounds like a good time to start.

 

[Monsieur Abeille]

I am wanting to try some things out this yr and this is on my list.
How do i build up drone colonies ? I know ,or think i need a drone laying Q but
without lots of nurse bees and so on the colony will not last long.
So how do you keep a drone colony up together.
The reasons for wanting to do this are for Q breeding latter down the line but i need to practise first

All queens are drone layers, the good ones lay workers as well! I dont think you want a drone colony - such a thing cannot survive - but you may want to encourage drone production in your hives

One way of doing this is to get special foundation with larger cell size. Leaving a super fram in a standard brood box will also encourage the building of drone cells. There must be other ways, but I will defer to those more knowedgable

EDIT: After reading RT's post I should probably remember to keep my mouth shut when there are those that know what they are talking about

 

[Rock_Chick]

with a Drone colony,how would you keep the varroa levels down?

 

[Poly Hive]

I know ,or think i need a drone laying Q

A drone laying queen is a queen which has run out of sperm.

A colony from which you want to use the drones is normally Q+.

There are normally enough drones in a colony for virgins to mate.

PH

 

[Finman]

Hi Finman
I don't have a drone layer,lol
Have another read, or is it me who's confused lol

SORRI, first time I meet a guy who breed drones...I hope that they do not belong to sexual minority...

 

[wightbees]

I am wanting to flood a area with a breed of drones so as to (try) and get a better chance at mating with my chosen Drones. Looking at the map where my bees are sited
I have a good chance of this happening depending on distance traveled( Queen wise)
I am going to give this a go and see what happens.
When my new queen got mated last yr all the new bees now look like buckfast lol
which is the type of bee on 2 of my hives lol I'm pretty sure there are no buckfast within 3 miles of me.
Thanks for all your help

WB

 

[oliver90owner]

Personally, with just 4 colonies, I would say forget it.

So many arguments against and little for, with a small operation.

This is for the bigger boys (and girls) who get the area saturated with their own drones (before the local mongrels are getting their act together). No real advantage for you.

Regards, RAB

 

[wightbees]

Maybe Rab
but i'm going to give it ago
Also something else , if you flood a area with your (mine) Drones i am forcing my chosen
bee type on the other colonies in the area( Been reading today Manley)
Now theres not that much competition in my area so i have a good chance in my Quest.

Hahaha hehehe hahahaha ,( my rule the world Laugh )

Sorry going made as you can all tell, but once i get back to work it will all die down .

 

[Silly Bee]

with a Drone colony,how would you keep the varroa levels down?

I think some raise drones for the purpose of varroa control. The differing hatch times allow removal of the drones, with varroa on them for disposal.

Can anyone confirm/correct that please?

 

[Poly Hive]

Your genetic pool is far too small Weight.

40+ then ok, colonies that is, but even at that level pepper pot brood will creep in, symptomatic of inbreeding.

PH

 

[wightbees]

Ph, say i had the 40 hives. (i wish)
If i was to bring new blood same bee type would this over come the inbreeding problem ?

 

[MuswellMetro]

Ph, say i had the 40 hives. (i wish)
If i was to bring new blood same bee type would this over come the inbreeding problem ?

Not into Q rearing ( though intend to) so only what i have read not experianced
so lots of diploid eggs laid by new queen ( pepper pot)

,A drone is an unfertalised egg ( single set of genes from the Queen) so she is mating with her self so eggs fertalised by this drone are not workers but diploid drones, these are killed by the nurse bees

so you need a lot more drone from other hive than the hive you are getting the virgin queens from ( i suppose you could cull the drone cells in that queen hive, but then they are less likey to produce Q cells so you would need to add drone cells from other hives

 

[RoofTops]

I bought 4 queens (random mated "cheapies") from Denmark a few years ago and bred from them. I raised drones in two of the colonies using shallow frames to encourage drone production and used one of the others for the actual cell raising. It worked the first year (the queens produced well tempered workers, which was what I was after) but I didn't bother the second year and the results were a nightmare - followed me everywhere and very defensive. It took a couple of years to breed this out of them but by then I was just letting the queens mate randomly. I didn't specifically try to raise drones - mainly because of the varroa problems I had when I tried it the first time. However, last year I took my mini-nucs to our branch apiary, which has good bees, and this seemed to work well. I plan to do the same this year.

However, the concept of raising drones in large numbers for mating is well established but as already said you need to be very careful about in-breeding if you keep the same stock.

You could of course shell out a hundred Euros for an island mated queen every couple of years and breed from her. I think you could get good results and the right corner of the IoW might be just the place to do it. A business opportunity beckons!

 

[BKF Admin]

Queens will always seek out their own type before mating with another type.

 

[wightbees]

Now there's a idea Rooftops

 

[MuswellMetro]

from the web

There may be several Drone Congregating Areas adjacent to each other. One study showed that a 10 sq k. area next to an commercial apiary contained at least 26 DCAs and 18km of flyways. Based on radar images a DCA was defined as an area approx. 100m in diameter, where the drones fly at a mean height of 25m-it depends on wind velocity. The stronger the wind, the lower the drones fly.

Many drones seem to stay faithful to one DCA, but may visit another in the same general direction. Two to three miles seems to be an average distance for a drone to fly, but they have been known to travel up to 5 miles. For a queen rearer wanting pure matings from a mating apiary, it seems that this is the minimum distance there must be from any other hives, or else a physical barrier of 500m or more must be present. The parentage of a sample of drones was tested in Germany in 1998, and the conclusion reached was that all the colonies in the area seemed to send roughly the same proportion of delegates to the meeting, thus minimising the chances of inbreeding. (C.Collinson, Bee Culture, Sep. 2008) Because mating takes place in flight, it is difficult to observe

 

[wightbees]

That similar to what i have read MM.
I going to try a few things out this yr and see what happens.I also need to have a chat
with the local BKA to see what hives they know of in my area, just to get a idea of what i'm up against. I am well out the way and it's just fields around me so i have high hopes of no other hives although theres bound to be something about but not much.