The more you read, the more you don't know.

[yoyo]

I love the old classic bee books that MB has put on his website. You can read all the modern day books on beekeeping you want, but these are the ones that did all the hard work and experimentation that got us to where we are today, and reading the old books explains alot of ideas that are taken for granted today. They can also add little gold nuggets of knowledge that make little light bulbs in your head light up. I would highly suggest that these are MUST READ books! The book from Huber states that during his experiments in trying to find out how queens get mated, he was experimenting with confining a new virgin queen in the hive. He states that if the queen is confined about 25 days and then released for mating, she would only lay drone eggs. In another section of his book in experiments on how bees make new queens when they are queenless, he states that colonies that are hopelessly queenless are very tolerent of drones and that he had been able to keep drones in his apairy into late winter.
With all of todays research promoting the importance of rearing drones from the best genetics, it seems like Huber had the answer on how to accomplish this in the apiary. Does it not seem like all you would have to do to breed selected drones would be to;
1. make a queenless colony similar to a queen starter.
2. select the hive from which to breed drones.
3. make a queen from this colony.
4. confine her for 25 days to insure she would lay only drones
5. introduce her to the queenless colony.
6. add drone comb to increase the population of drones.
7. manage this hive by adding young nurse bees, and feeding (treat for mites!)
8. Saturate the apiary with drones from this one selected hive.

or is there more to it than meets the eye?

[Michael Bush]

This method has been suggested by several of the old book writers including Jay Smith, and Isaac Hopkins among others.

[Putz]

You'd have to be adding combs of sealed worker brood on a weekly basis, to keep the population of workers up in the drone colony. Someone has to do the work, and drones sure won't, and the drones need some workers to feed them for their first 10 days of life!

[tecumseh]

yoyo writes:
or is there more to it than meets the eye?

tecumseh:
huber was blind I believe? is this a blind attempt at humor? I am kidding you of course (incert your favorite funny face here).

huber....use to be a lot of tradional bee keeping families always had a son by the name of huber.... 'the name' is associated with a lot of science landmarks. to me he also is one of the founders/leading edge of 'the naturalist' movement in science.

the overlooked aspects are 1) most time queenless hives and the drones they produce are not really the most desirable genetic material for producing the best queens, 2) to produce queens in any quantity would require more than just one drone laying hive (especially if you thought about saturating an area with drones) and 3) drones require about 2 weeks of time to mature so if you are not doing what ray marler describes (in #3) then likely any drones produced may not be of the highest quality (significantly fluctuating temperture would make this more a certainty than a question).

[sierrabees]

If you could do this successfully, you might increase the risk of inbreeding by overpopulating the area with a limited range of genetics in the drone population. There's pluses and minuses to everything.

[Michael Bush]

The concept of a purposefully queenless hive is to induce hives to keep drones later in the year and control the source of those drones.

One method of getting more of the drones you want is to have frames of drone comb and put them in your drone mother hives and when they are capped, pull them out and put empty drone comb in again. Put these in other hives after removing the drone brood from them. That way the other hives are raising drones from the drone mother and since the drone mother keeps losing their drones, they continue to try to raise them.

Then, as far as keeping them around, a queenless hive will tend to keep them longer and if the drones around are the ones you want you've stacked the deck.

I've found the ferals, which is what I prefer, have drones earlier and later than the domestic Italians so I figure that works if you raise queens early or late. Dee Lusby has been suggesting this for some time as well, mating early or late to get feral genetics.

[sierrabees]

MB

As usual, your explaination makes a lot of sense. With your approach a single drone producing hive could import drone comb even from distant yards or one could trade drone comb from a friend who had desirable stock to avoid inbreeding.