A Bee Space: Radical Apiary Dronectomy

The following blog contains graphic descriptions & images....you have been warned!

The Bee Team

If you've been tagging along on our journey you know that a few nights ago Kris and I discovered a problem in one of our hives. A drone problem to be exact.

We (Kris, Bill and I) along with our auxiliary team members David, Dee and Mike and special guest Lisa went back down to the bee yard to solve our little drone problem. In full bee gear, except me because I have a bad case of bravado, we went in with surgical precision and performed a procedure which we now call a Radical Apiary Dronectomy.

Fist we anesthetized our bees with smoke, then we carefully lifted the frames one by one, checked for the queen and using the hive tool we scraped all the drone cells off of the bottom of the frame. It was not a pretty site. Large white drone larva oozed from the cells and dripped onto frames. If the sight of carnage was not enough there was also an accompanying sound which I believe David described as popping a chocolate covered cherry. I thought it sounded more like running over army worms with your roller blades. This was not for the squeamish. We lost a few of the auxiliary members at this point.

After we scraped the drones off we also removed supercedure and swarm cells. Threw on the queen excluder, added third deep and closed up the hive. Surgery was over. We hoped we had not accidentally scraped off our queen. This was our only concern.

Below are pictures of our latest adventure in beekeeping - special thanks to David for taking them. As we looked at the pictures that night we were happy to discover we had a picture of our queen. She was up in the second deep safe and sound.

Peace,
Karen