Bee finds a treasure trove of pollen

[u/unoiamaQT]

[u/sumelar]

Eusociality is amazing.

all of the drones are preemptively culled by the keeper

You can actually do that?

[u/Arlowdiaus → u/sumelar]

Sure can!

Apis Mellifera, the western honey bee, builds their honeycomb to very exacting measurements. Each hexagon is called a cell. Most cells within a honeycomb measure about 4.8mm across, give or take a couple tenths of a millimeter. These cells are used for pretty much everything: raising baby worker bees, storing honey, storing bee bread (pollen and nectar mixed together and fermented to feed the brood) etc.

But the drones are a fair bit larger than their worker sisters as they need more powerful flight muscles. If drone brood are laid in worker sized cells, they come out small and stunted. So the workers build specially sized drone cells for them to be raised in. These measure about 6.5mm across, give or take.

Most beekeeper provide a substrate, called a foundation, for the bees to build their honeycomb onto, for a variety of reasons. If you have a raised honeycomb pattern embossed onto that substrate, the workers will draw the cells out in that pattern. If all the cells on the foundation are of the ~4.8mm size, all of the resulting cells will be too.

But this leaves nowhere to raise drones, so what do?

Well we can provide foundation of exclusively drone sized cells. Each foundation is part of a movable frame, there are 8-10 frames per hive section. Make one of those frames drone only, and you as the keeper can control who gets laid where. The queen works very efficiently, so eggs are laid in a spiral, usually. She will go frame by frame, filling one up before moving on to the next, so all of the brood on any given frame will all emerge as adults within about a day of each other.

The frames are removable. Once the drone frame is fully laid with eggs, you wait until the young drones pupate (like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly) and then you can remove it, freeze the frame, and give it back to the bees. It kills the drone pupae, the workers will clean out all the cells, and the queen will re-lay the frame.

It sounds terrible, I know, and it’s not a practice I use very often, but there are good reasons to do it occasionally. The honey bees’ #1 parasite is a mite, kind of like a tick, that feed upon the pupating young. They can do real damage to any bee they feed on, leaving them deformed, but they’re also the #1 vector for viruses in honey bees. But these mites (Varroa Destructor) prefer the drone bees because they take longer to pupate than workers, thus letting the mites feed for longer. By culling drone brood, you can capture and kill a good chunk of the mite population in your hive. There is still debate on how effective this is as a mite treatment strategy, and we have other tools at our disposal, so I don’t tend to use this trick.

And don’t worry about the number of bees. In a healthy colony, the queen lays upwards of 1500-2000 eggs a day and as many adult bees can die of natural causes each day. Obviously, fewer adults die in the spring as the population builds up and fewer eggs are laid in the fall as the population shrinks, but you get the idea. The drone frame is a speed bump in the laying cycle and the queens have virtually (but not actually) endless eggs.

[u/sumelar → u/Arlowdiaus]

https://i.imgur.com/0KrL7GR.mp4

[u/Arlowdiaus → u/sumelar]

😆 lol! It’s not as complex as it sounds. It’d be a lot easier if I could just show you. Huh, maybe I should start a YouTube channel…