Drone Layer: Detect and Remove

When inspecting my white hive at home, I found that their were many tell tale signs of a drone layer.

How do drone layers come about?
Sometimes old queens run out of stored sperm from their initial mating flights and can no longer lay fertilized eggs. The hive typically will supercede this queen before it ever happens. Another way that drone layers come about is when there is a prolongued absence of a queen (due to swarming, death, etc). The queens pharamones suppress the development of the ovaries in all of the female workers. Without a queen around, some of the workers will have their ovaries develop. These workers will then start laying eggs. Since these workers do not go for mating flights, they can only lay drones (unfertilized eggs).

How to tell you have a drone layer?
- Consistantly multiple eggs per cell
- A large number of drone bees in the hive or a large number of drone larvae (when capped, they have a pertruded dome shape)
- eggs in the honey super (the regular queen cannot fit through the queen excluder)

What happens when you do not get rid of a drone layer?
The hive will suffer greatly if the drone layer is not removed. In the two cases that I had a drone layer; I had purchased a new queen and the drone layer was also around. The bees will try to supercede the new queen because of all of the drone laying and that will not work because the queen is not the problem. Waiting for the drone queen to die may also take too long.

How to get rid of a drone layer? (See slideshow below)

1. Capture the queen and store her in a safe place near the hive
2. Take the entire hive (except for the landing, an empty box, the queen and the cover) and bring it 100m from the location and ideally in tall grass.
3. Dump/Sweep all of the bees into the grass. You may have to sweep each frame several times.
4. Return to the hive location and put the hive back together. The foraging bees will return and the drone layer and other nurse bees will be left in the grass.