Drone brood massacre

[Trog]

As I wandered round the hives in the evening rain (avoiding the odd flying bee), I noticed one colony had chucked out lots of drone larvae of various ages. None of the others have done this but I wonder if these ones have simply decided the summer is over (who could blame them?) and that drones are now surplus to requirements. Normally my bees don't kick out the drones until October and I sometimes see drones in November but this lot arrived as a swarm last summer and hived themselves so might not be related to my other bees. I'm rather fond of this lot as they're generally nice to work with.

[Adam]

One hive of mine is on concrete at the office and a few weeks ago there were loads of dead bees outside the hive which turned out to be all drone - I probably would not have noticed them excpet they were so noticable compared to being on grass. I assume that the colony was happy with their collective lot and decided that the drones ' services would not be required any more. This was a 2010 queen with a double brood and doing really well.

The second part of the post is that on Friday I opened the hive up to put a clearer board in to take off some honey and discovered that the colony was queenless. Just sealed brood and a couple of emergency - late in the day - queencells; that's all. This is perhaps one of the 'modern' cases of the dissappearing queens. Alternatively I might have damaged her previously - enough that she could not lay but not enough that she did not hang around for a few days before the bees realised that something was wrong, by which time it was too late to produce a decent queencell. Fortunately I had a spare which I popped in on Sunday morning in a butler cage; Interestingly there was a huge roar from the hive as I closed it up. Whether it was a roar of acceptance or a roar of disgust as the old queen was still present I don't know. I'll know next week if she has been accepted OK.