# Golden Queen with a problem



## Joseph Clemens (Feb 12, 2005)

Below is the image of a Cordovan Italian queen, the daughter of a recent acquisition from Koehnen's. This is one of the first few nice looking queens I have managed to produce since I began working on raising more queens this season. Our Summer heat slows me down. Unfortunately too, I had a stupid moment and forgot to remove the queen includer after installing her ripe cell into the super beneath the queen includer. There was a small escape entrance where she was confined, but obviously she never managed to locate it. She is a very prolific layer of eggs, having already filled four combs with her eggs, nice solid pattern, unfortunately her larvae are beginning to be capped, all of them are inspiring the cappings only drones receive despite being laid in worker cells. Obviously she never managed to mate, despite our excellent weather and abundance of drones. I decided to take a few photographs before sending her reluctantly to her oblivion. Too bad, drone layers don't seem to have an appearance that unequivocally identifies their unfortunate situation. No doubt, if she had been able to mate and return safely to the hive, she would have become an excellent and productive queen. I replaced her with another ripe sister queen cell but this time without the excluder.


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## Troy (Feb 9, 2006)

I have wondered about using a drone laying queen with the right genetics for breeding. 

I mean if you are breeding anyway, then you need drones. If you had a hive with 5 or so drone frames and 5 more frames that you continually restocked from other hives, you could keep the hive running and saturate the area with drones from the line you want even more easily.


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## Joseph Clemens (Feb 12, 2005)

Troy,
I think there may be some breeders that use unmated drone laying queens as you suggest. I'm sure that if she were provided with frames of empty drone comb, that she would lay in them. Her hive would also need to be supported in other ways too. Continuous additions of emerging worker brood or shake in young nurse bees. Also it would probably help to provide frames of honey and pollen. One difficulty is that she doesn't limit her laying to drone-sized cells, she lays copious numbers of eggs in worker-sized comb, where the nurse bees raise them into very small drones. My understanding is that these smaller drones lack the ability to compete with normal sized drones. I suppose if the worker size combs were rotated out often enough, and any brood in them was placed overnight in a freezer, before being returned to a normal hive, this could work out okay, but it would take a good amount of careful management.


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## bluegrass (Aug 30, 2006)

How about rotating the small sized drone brood through other hives as mite control? Okay it sounds like too much work now that I wrote it down.... Nice looking queen.


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