MillerThousand AnswersBeekeepingQuestions.pdf - BioBees

isisTHOUSAND ANSWERS 73A. Eggs are likely to be laid in drone-cells as soon as therea considerable flow, and drones will appear 24 days later.Q. Will drones stay with a colony of bees without a queen?A. Yes, better than with a queen.Q. Two of my hives have some drones yet (November.) Whyit?A. I'm afraid they're queenless ;yet it sometimes happensthat drones are suffered late where there is a good queen andplenty of honey.Q. I find that one of my colonies is still rearing drones. Thequeen looks all right. She has been one of the best among 65. Sheis supposed to be young as she came through the mail in May,and I started her with a small bunch of bees, and she built up astrong colony. I didn't notice any drones until lately. (January.)A. The queen may be all right and she may be all wrong. Itsometimes happens that a colony takes a notion to cherish somedrones after drones are generally killed off, keeping them throughthe winter, while the queen is all right, but the fear is that yourqueen has become a drone-layer, even if she is not old. You canprobably tell by the sealed brood next spring or even now, ifthere is any sealed brood present. If you find cappings of workercellsflat, that's all right. If they are raised and rounded, like somany little marbles, the queen is a drone-layer, and should bekilled. To be sure, there has been known such a thing as a queengetting over being a drone-layer, as W. M. Whitney has reported,but you better not count on that.Q. My bees had no drones to speak of this season, except ontwo or three days, when I saw four or five flying from two hives,and the bees killed them right away. What was the cause?A. The absence of drones may be due to the poorness of theseason. Keeping drones is a sort of luxury that bees indulge inwhen they are prosperous, and when forage is scarce they donot feel they can afford it.Q. My nearest beekeeping neighbor is a mile and one-quarter.If I stock up with Italians is there much danger of my queens beingfertilized by his black drones? I use full sheets of foundation,and have very few drones. He uses only starters, and I saw wholeframes in his hives that were built out solid with drone-comb, excepttwo inches where the starter was. He had six colonies, andgot no surplus. They swarmed as soon as they got a half-gallon ofbees in a hive, and I don't want any of his stock, but would liketo rear most of my own queens. Two of those I reared werelarger and better layers than the one I bought.