| DRONE BROOD MANIPULATION!!! |
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| Home Made Drone Comb |
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While talking to my mentor, Randy Oliver, about powered sugar, we drifted to the popular subject of drone brood removal. He knew we practiced it, but realized and became very concerned that I was not telling beekeepers that drone brood manipulation was a big part of our IPM strategy, especially since I've been talking to so many beekeepers. He was right. It wasn't part of my literature, nor in my talks.
I was set up to give our club's program, first Monday in February on attending the 2005 North West Corner Fall Beekeepers Conference in Oregon. It was a huge affair with the top professors and scientist in our field, talking about everything, and I mean everything. Randy picked scientist that he hoped I could take notes on. As it worked out, I was able do it all, man the booth between and sit in on almost every talk and take notes. Over 400 people attended, standing room only, it was awesome. Here are my notes, I just posted them as I wrote them, excuse the mess, stuff changes fast in the bee world.
My methods of drone brood manipulation were pretty vague. For years we have been putting medium and shallow frames in deep supers in the brood boxes and cutting away the drone brood. A lot of work for the bees to keep drawing out that comb. A few years ago, we tried to make comb honey by putting empty frames in top supers and accidently ended up with frame of drone comb, which we immediately removed and put in the freezer. We started to cycle these in and out of the brood boxes during swarming season. Since we practice reversing the supers every ten days making sure the queen is in the bottom and to cut out queen cells, it was a good time to exchange the capped drone brood for the frozen brood in the freezer (at least 24 hours to kill mites). All we did was scrape the cappings with an uncapping fork and put them back in the hive. The bees did all the work of removing dead drones and mites. In 20 days we remove and replace. We would pull them during the honey flow since we tried not to disturb the bees. Turns out, we could have done this through August.
There is so much information and variations on this technique, Cornell University, the Dutch and the New Zealander’s all have versions. Nick Calderone article has a great article in the Feb 2006 issue of Bee Culture. George Fergusson, a Maine Beekeeper, a regular on the BeeSouce.com forum, simplified the Dutch Version, complete with pictures. At first glance, I couldn’t believe he was saying it was as easy as depicted. My poor little mind just couldn’t get it. I decided to try it on empty boxes. IT WORKS! You start with two colonies and in 5 weeks you split to 3 colonies and they should be at least 85% mite free. I’m thinking of treating them at that point with a final dusting of powdered sugar
My program changed for Monday night, just days before the meeting. Randy was skeptical that I could pull it off. I made some props. Cardboard boxes became supers. I taped pictures of drone and worker brood on cardboard (the ends from the boxes I used). Colored the drone comb green and capped drone comb various shades of green. I had a couple of stuff bees and a cookie rake for the queen excluder. After all, if I’m going on the road, I have to travel light. I made copies for all members and gave my demo just this last Monday. Everyone understood.
I’m on the road again in the Bay area, so I’ll post more as I get time.
Gotta go,
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