another question

[yoyo]

When colonies are preparing to swarm, there are preparations that are done before this happens. Just ask Walt Wright. These preparations include:
1. increase honey stores so that the parent colony AND the swarm colony will have enough food to get them by for awhile.
2. increase population so the number of bees left in the parent colony AND the swarm will have enough bees to ensure the continued growth of the colony. This means queen attendants, nurse bees, cleaning bees, guard bees, and foraging / scout bees, AND drones. In other words, bees of all ages doing all of the necesary duties, and plenty of them.

I have noticed the buildup of drone brood just before the swarming happens.

Now for the question. I have read that worker bees will sense eggs that were fertilized by drones of the same hive (brothers) and remove them from the brood.This can be seen on a comb and is referred to as "the shotgun pattern", and can be hints that the queen is running out of sperm also. This would seem to help prevent bad genetics that come from in-breeding. If this is true, why would the queen waste time and resources by laying a large amount of drone brood before the swarm leaves, only to have the workers remove the eggs?
I can see that if all hives swarmed at the same time, this could be beneficial to the apiary as a whole.

Anyone?

[Michael Bush]

>Now for the question. I have read that worker bees will sense eggs that were fertilized by drones of the same hive (brothers) and remove them from the brood.

If a drone egg is fertilized it is in a worker cell and it is a diploid drone and not a normal haploid drone. This is because of the way the sex alleles work in bees. They are not sensing that they are brothers, but rather that there are male eggs in the worker cells.

>This can be seen on a comb and is referred to as "the shotgun pattern"

Yes.

> and can be hints that the queen is running out of sperm also.

Yes.

> This would seem to help prevent bad genetics that come from in-breeding. If this is true, why would the queen waste time and resources by laying a large amount of drone brood before the swarm leaves, only to have the workers remove the eggs?

She will lay drones in drone cells. These are not removed. They are haploid (unfertilized) eggs.

>I can see that if all hives swarmed at the same time, this could be beneficial to the apiary as a whole.

The trigger to raise drones is enough nutrition available to do so. The trigger to swarm is probably related to that also among several other factors.