[muskratcreekhoney]

Last year when I went out to harvest honey from an out apairy much to my surprise I discovered that one of the hives swarmed and is now a drone layer.
I ended up bringing this colony back home where I treated with Miteaway 2 and requeened. The queen took but this colony didn't overwinter well, lots of dead bees and only a handfull of bees and my russian queen. What should I have done? Should I have destroyed all of the sealed drone brood? P.S this happened about mid July.

 

[indypartridge]

Actually, I think you were lucky they survived. My experience with adding a new queen to a drone-layer colony is a dead queen. Typically for drone-laying colonies, a shake-out is recommended: take all the boxes about 30 yards away, shake out ALL the bees, take the boxes back and reassemble. The drone layers won't be able to make it back. Sometimes it works, sometimes not.

I've had some luck with adding a new frame of brood from another hive for about 3 consecutive weeks, and then re-queening.