Overwintered drones

[fatshark]

At my first inspection last weekend I saw a couple of drones. There was no evidence of drone brood anywhere - and precious little brood at all in some colonies - so it made me wonder if these might have overwintered. The drones were in the stronger colonies (perhaps with 5-6 frames of brood).

Too cold this weekend to do anything but put out some bait hives :(

[Jon]

I have a colony which always overwinters some drones.
The first time I noticed this I thought the queen was failing but this queen has gone through 3 winters now and has a decent pattern of worker brood on a couple of frames.

[gavin]

I have a colony which always overwinters some drones.
The first time I noticed this I thought the queen was failing but this queen has gone through 3 winters now and has a decent pattern of worker brood on a couple of frames.

Interesting. I saw a strain in WC Scotland, and for a while owned a colony of it, descended from a Buckfast line (from Buckfast in its later days), which appeared to hold back drone raising then produced them in a rush.

Early (and late) drone production would get your genes propagated where supersedure is frequent at the cost of some colony resources and risk of drone-amplified pathogens (Varroa, but there could be others).

Delayed, in season, drone production maximises resources for (worker) build-up and holds back drone-amplified pathogens.

I'm sure that it has been said many times but our fickle climate must encourage stocks that diversify their mating strategy.

[fatshark]

So the additional Q I should have asked is whether overwintered drones remain able to contribute to the gene pool? Do they remain sexually mature or do they go 'off the boil' so to speak. Of course, mating also weather and virgin Q dependent ...

[Jon]

This queen I mentioned above is a 100% AMM colony (on morphometry, caveats apply)
It did try and supersede last August but I put the supersedure queen in an apidea when I found her with a cluster on a fence post after a mating flight.
It was only a few days later I worked out where this queen had come from as I found the open supersedure cell in the colony.
The original marked queen is still there. I saw her last week.


So the additional Q I should have asked is whether overwintered drones remain able to contribute to the gene pool? Do they remain sexually mature or do they go 'off the boil' so to speak. Of course, mating also weather and virgin Q dependent ...

Don't know. My guess would be that some of them remain viable, maybe with reduced fertility.
I know from the couple of times I have been involved with II work that a lot of the drones are firing blanks at the best of times.

[Neils]

Occam's Razor and all that, but if there's no drone brood in the colony but drones in evidence might they be from other neighbouring colonies?

This year for me is totally up in the air, but year-before-last I had some colonies "doing well" on 4-5 frames of brood and no drones in late march while another colony in a different apiary which I wasn't inspecting as a result was already swarming.

[fatshark]

Could be Neils. I know most of the local beekeepers and apiaries and most have tales of woe and winter carnage, rather than strong colonies ready to swarm. However, weather forecast is good for midweek and - on the off chance - I've put out some bait hives today :)

[Neils]

I do also wonder, in a slightly related note, just how far Drones manage to wander and whether there is any research into that whatsoever. We know they'll be let into just about any hive they happen across, but how far will they meander from the hive where they emerged?

Given that drones are the ginger haired stepchildren of beehives, how much attention has actually been paid to what they get up to when out and about? We know precious little about DCAs it seems and over module groups I've had frequent heated discussions about how queens get to DCAs with both sides admitting that actually we haven't got a clue how it actually works, current knowledge seems to be entirely supposition and whoever shouts loudest over or for conventional wisdom might just win.