We have all seen frames like this:
You open up a hive and find nothing but scattered drone brood. And I mean scattered:
You will likely find brood in all stages in between the puffy drone cells, maybe even some worker cells if you catch this condition just as it begins in the hive. And depending on who is laying the drones, you may also see multiple eggs laid wonky in the cells.
Hives full of drone brood are trouble. Big Trouble. Not just because there is no productive colony at work here, or because your comb is now all warped and full of drone cells….but because as the worker population dwindles, leaving only drones, there is no one to forage, no food coming in. Everyone is slowly starving, stressed, overloaded with mites and…disease prone. It is not unusual for a hive in the advanced stages of drone laying to develop viral diseases or EFB.
And you do NOT want highly contagious diseases in your apiary. Ever.
Ok, so what drives this condition? How do you arrive at the drone layer situation?
There are multiple routes:
- Your hive swarms, as healthy and crowded hives are programmed to do. But for some reason, they fail to requeen. Perhaps for some reason none of the queen cells made prior to swarming develop normally. Perhaps when the emerging queens duel, all die, leaving no Queen Victorious. Perhaps your new queen is damaged in some way. Or fails to survive her perilous mating flight. Because the hive is now truly queenless, with no eggs with which to make a new queen larvae, as brood and queen pheromone levels drop, the suppressed ability of the workers to lay eggs is….un-suppressed. But they have never been on mating flights, and can only lay unfertilized eggs. In the world of bees, unfertilized eggs can only grow up to be…drones.
- Your hive swarms, leaving multiple queen cells behind. But the colony is so strong, as the new virgins emerge they do not duel for ascendancy, they begin to leave in virgin swarms. The first will be a decent size, but as more virgins leave with swarms (often multiple virgins with each), the size of the swarms diminishes. In the last swarm, sadly tiny, ALL the remaining virgins may swarm away, leaving the hive critically depleted and hopelessly queenless. Again, the lack of brood and queen pheromones means the workers start to lay, a desperate attempt to send the colony’s genes out to the next generation of bees. But they do it badly, and ultimately the hive fails.
- A new queen emerges but is prevented from going on her mating flights. Weather can close in, making flights impossible (common in supercedures very late or very early in the season). Perhaps she has a defective flight system…deformed wings or muscles. If her mating flight is delayed long enough, she will never mate successfully, and be able to lay only unfertilized eggs = drones.
- Your lovely new Queen Victorious flies off to her mating flights but either mates with sterile drones (drone fertility is adversely affected by pesticides, and by overheating brood in transport OR via heat treatment for mite control), or for some reason is unable to use the semen she brings home. The valve on her spermatheca may be defective, or missing. She may be able to lay eggs, but is unable to fertilize them, and unfertilized eggs = drones.
- No matter how well mated any queen is, she carries on board a finite amount of drone semen. If she is fortunate, all the matings she has are with fertile, unrelated drones, and her laying career is long and illustrious. But even the best queen can run out of the necessaries, or the spermatozoa in her spermatheca finally age out and die. At first she just begins laying the odd drone by accident, but eventually when she opens that valve to fertilize eggs, there is no semen left. All good things eventually come to an end. Her rate of lay will slow until finally all she lays are unfertilized eggs = drones.
- Whilst managing your colonies, you inadvertently kill your queen. It happens surprisingly often. That plump, long body is easy to roll between frames…very easy. You don’t think about that when you do your next inspection, but you see queen cells, which you destroy….thus rendering your hive hopelessly queenless. DO NOT DESTROY QUEEN CELLS UNLESS YOU SEE THE QUEEN AND/OR EGGS. Hopelessly queenless hives will experience that drop in queen and brood pheromones, the workers will begin to lay their unfertilized eggs = drone brood.
- You dequeen a hive and forget you have hung a queen pheromone stick in the hive. The queenless bees interpret the queen pheromone stick as being queenright. They fail to start queen cells, and in three days, they are hopelessly queenless….and the laying worker slide begins.
- You cull the queen cells in a hive that has for some reason lost its queen…or maybe you take a frame with queen cells and make it into a mating colony. Either way, you unfortunately keep only queen cells made from larvae a little too old to be optimal when raised as queens (emergency cells), and they develop into “half caste” queens, which are queens with poorly developed queen characteristics (low pheromone levels, small ovaries). They may carry the hive for a while, usually poorly, then fail.
Note that laying workers will, in a final act of desperation, attempt to make queen cells out of unfertilized eggs. These cells are not typical queen cells: they are tiny, runty, unusually smooth and often darker in colour than optimal queen cells.
Although the photo above is meant to teach you what drone cells look like as opposed to queen cells, the queen cell in the blue circle is a typical basement quality queen cell that probably contains a drone larva. It is not likely to emerge. It looks to me like the bees start a queen cell, then realize the larva is either low quality, half caste or a drone, and they give up on the cell building, seal it and walk away. Note how short the cell is, barely bigger than a normal worker cell, how smooth and unfinished it looks. Contrast that with a truly beautiful quality queen cell:
Ok, so there are lots of ways to arrive at the dreaded drone layer hive. Lots. And let’s not kid ourselves: most are the fault of the beekeeper. It takes WEEKS for drone laying hives to set up. Where was the beekeeper in all that time? Ya gotta ask…
Now to be fair, the beekeeper may never have seen a drone laying hive before. Things look good, from the outside. Bees are still flying at the hive door.
But on the inside, upon inspection, things look grim. Brood amounts have fallen. Even if there is still some worker brood in the hive, you see less, and it is often scattered. There are too many drones and drone cells, which are also often scattered.
Here is an enviable honeybee frame, below. Note the flat, continuous sheet of worker brood. The girls are making some drone cells but they are at the outside lower edges of the frame, and will appear in a clump.
And below is a terrible frame from a drone laying hive.
Not only is all or most of the brood puffy drone brood, it is scattered, laid higgledy-piggledy. In the first photo you can see the bees were forced to expand the worker cells into drone cells, warping the comb.
If you see spotty frames like this, particularly in the main season when the hives should be strong and laying lots of brood, you have an emergency on your hands.
What to do?
Most folks, realizing they are queenless, will decide what the hive needs is a queen. They go out and buy a beautiful new queen, and they hang her cage in the hive, only to return a few days later and find her dead. Why didn’t their clearly queenless hive not rejoice at the sight and scent of a lovely new queen??
Well, the sad fact is, the bees thought they DID have a queen. Either they have a drone laying queen, or they have laying workers. That first photo is likely a drone laying queen. She’s laying…not perfectly, but in reasonable quantity, and is coming back to lay up any empty cells. Alas, all she can lay is drones. But the bees are queenright, and they don’t want a new queen.
The second frame is likely laying workers. The brood is widely scattered, kinda sparse. And you probably see these:
Multiple cells laid wonky in the cells. New queens will lay a bit wonky like this at the very beginning of their careers…not usually this many eggs in the cell, but wonky. The difference is: they begin laying nicely within a day or two AND their brood caps out as worker brood.
So just hanging a queen in the hive is highly unlikely to correct the situation.
Hives need more than just a queen to be successful! They need at least two frames of worker bees, preferably of all ages. And access to either forage or a feeder and pollen sub. And they need to be disease free and as free of mites as possible.
What are your other options? If you are determined to renovate this hive that is, in reality, dead on its feet, filled with drones and geriatric workers, know that saving this hive is going to take lots of time and resources. And you must have enough time left in the season for the hive population to build: 6-8 weeks.
But if you insist, here are your options roughly in order of efficacy:
- Do you have a robust nuc with a hot queen, preferably young, at the helm? Newspaper the nuc onto this colony. Result: you add drones to a colony that doesn’t need them, while risking the existing, successful queen.
- Add one frame of open brood weekly to this hive until they make a queen cell. Result: you will probably get a queen cell, a poor one, eventually, all the while robbing successful hives of resources.
- Add one frame of open brood weekly, and on week 3, add a frame with a capped queen cell. It will help if you put a roller cage on the queen cell to prevent the bees from taking it down. Result: with luck a quality queen will emerge, and the hive will gradually recover.
- Shake the bees out 50 feet or more from the hive. The theory is the laying workers are young bees who have never been out of the hive and won’t find it again. Introduce a queen. Cross your fingers. Result: you add a queen to a hive full of drones and old bees, so at best they will struggle to get back on their feet.
Do you see where I am heading with this? Truly drone laying hives are not worth saving. Unless you have caught this situation very early in its development, when there is still a good population of workers and some capped worker brood still about to emerge, there is nothing to save.
Renovating a drone laying hive takes resources. You would be better off splitting a healthy, robust hive headed by a good queen. That would net you increase with less expenditure of time and resources, and with much less risk.
You are better off shaking the remaining bees out in the yard. Spray them first with a good dose of 1:1 syrup, and wait 15 minutes for them to fill their little bee tummies. Then shake them out in the middle of the beeyard. Take their hive AND their hive stand away. Leave nothing for them to return to. They will beg their way into the nearby hives, and be accepted as they are bringing a load of sugar syrup with them. Do this late in the day for the least amount of confusion.
Then freeze all the affected comb, scrape it down, disinfect the frames, and rewax before putting them into service again. Get rid of all that drone comb or even your good queens will be filling it with drone brood!
CAVEAT: first make sure, be absolutely certain, that the drone laying hive is healthy. If you shake out a sick hive, the bees will carry that sickness into all the nearby hives. All of them. Do not, do not, do not shake out a hive with hinky brood. Hinky brood is usually stricken with foulbrood. And every adult bee in that hive has a crop full of foulbrood spores. Or chalkbrood. Or sacbrood.
Hinky brood:
This hinky brood will not go away in a flow. It will not go away with a good queen, even an “hygienic” line queen.
It will not go away with a strong worker population, hygienic behaviour or by crowding the bees.
It may recede for a while but it will be back, and it will spread as bees drift between hives, which they do all the time.
It will also spread if you take the frames from a sick hive and give them to other hives. The stores (bee bread, honey and pollen) are all contaminated with disease spores.
Do not tolerate hinky brood. Get test kits, make an accurate diagnosis and proceed accordingly. Don’t leave the door open to diseases. Shut that door.
The best preventive for drone laying hives is frequent inspections.
If your queen is laying poorly, if the brood looks shotty and scattered, requeen early (assuming no disease is present).
If a hive raising a new queen has no brood or eggs 40 days after splitting/when queen cells were made or provided, requeen with a mated queen. Or combine with a queenright nuc full of brood.
Don’t wait until the hive is full of drone brood. Act early.
It really pays to make three practices central to your beekeeping:
- requeen any bought package ASAP in the season as package queens frequently fail, often at the worst possible time!
- always keep a nuc or two bubbling along with a spare new queen…you can use the nuc to requeen a lacklustre or outright queenless hive or split, and use the brood the nuc produces to boost other colonies.
- Inspect often and regularly to be sure the colony is well and thriving.
Good luck beekeepers! We all have this problem from time to time. Take your lumps and do what is best for your bees.
Here We Bee 