[WBVC]

Title pretty much sums it up.

Two of my hives have wall to wall drones in the honey supers. Workers below that with plenty of capped worker brood.

I was given good advice to get the drones off the supers and install an excluder...on the to do list for this week

But no explanation why these hives have so many drones in the honey supers.

If you know why this happens, if it is a sign of doom or not I would appreciate learning about it.

Thanks.

 

[Oldtimer]

Is your hive natural comb? If so you will have quite a lot of drone comb in it. Assuming the queen is normal the bees will build up to their preferred level of drones and then stop raising them, using the drone comb for storage, till levels drop a bit and they will raise drones again.

Very high drone levels in a hive with a normal queen can be a precursor to swarming.

Re your queen excluder idea, not sure, but it could be that if you do that and crowd all the drones into the brood nest, the bees will be more aware of the numbers of them and not raise as many, but that's just a theory. Bees in the brood nest area do tend to push drones out of the way, if there's a lot of them they'll congregate on the outside frames, and honey areas.

 

[WBVC]

The honey dadant frames are plastic foundation...but the bees ignored that and built beautiful 2 side drone comb in one of the hives.

I must admit in did not look for swarm cells deeper in the brood boxes.

 

[Santa Caras]

if you do put an excluder on, make sure you give the drones a way out up top. They wont be able to squeeze thru the excluder and will remain stuck up in the top boxes..