Drone Brooding
Lexikon
Drone brooding refers to a colony that produces only drones.
Drone brooding refers to a colony that produces only drones. On the comb this shows up as humped brood: drone larvae, which need more space, develop in the narrow worker cells. The bees therefore draw the cells out longer and cap them with a cap that bulges outward. The brood pattern looks irregular and bumpy, and worker brood is missing.
Two quite different causes lie behind this, and they must be told apart. Either a queen is still present whose sperm supply is exhausted, or who was poorly mated or not mated at all. She then lays only unfertilized eggs. Or the colony was queenless for a long time and no longer had any young brood from which to raise a replacement queen. In that case, individual worker bees begin to lay themselves. These bees are called laying workers. Their work can be recognized by the fact that several eggs are often found in one cell, and the eggs do not stand cleanly on the cell floor but stick to the cell wall.
A drone-brooding colony is difficult to save, especially in the case of laying workers. The laying workers look like any other bee and cannot be picked out. An introduced queen is, as a rule, stung to death. At the same time, no new worker bees are being raised, so the colony shrinks and dies out without intervention.
In practice, such a colony is therefore usually dissolved rather than treated. If colony health is otherwise good, the bees are first allowed to take up feed and are then brushed off so they can integrate into neighboring colonies. Severely weakened or diseased colonies are sulfured. A common mistake is waiting for weeks for improvement or repeatedly introducing new queens. That only costs time and queens.