Excessive amount of drone brood and drones?

[brooksbeefarm]

Every once in a while i find a hive with excessive amount of drone brood, but still good tight patterns of worker brood??. My first thought is they are thinking about swarming. What are your thoughts? Jack

[LazyBkpr]

Jack, what is excessive?
   I usually have an equivelant of about two FULL frames of drone brood scattered about my foundation-less frames..  On the older queens I will sometimes get a little more when they think they are going to be strong enough to swarm. 

[Riverrat]

If you think you have to much drone cells in a frame. I would rotate out  to the edge of the brood nest and insert a frame of foundation into the middle of nest so the can draw out worker cells.

[Lburou]

......... My first thought is they are thinking about swarming. What are your thoughts? Jack

Jack, aside from increased morale within the hive, that is what I think when I see a lot of drone brood. 

A stable of drones makes genes available for neighboring hives when they need genetic material delivered in-flight.  Perhaps the colonies know that and do their part to make drones available.  Expression of genes varies....Perhaps there is a gene that produces drones in excess the way some bees hoard excess pollen....Or, the way some bees have excessive hygienic habits....? 

[Jen]

Lburou, good thinking right there. I have seen this in my hive as well, I now think that maybe in the early spring the bees are making plenty of mating material to assure surrounding hives have plenty of opportunity for new hatching queens and swarm survival.

Much like after the ravages of war, human population will produce more boy babies for awhile.

[Woody Roberts]

I've often wondered this same thing. Being the hillbilly philosopher that I am I have lots of theory's, most have been proved wrong.
Along with the swarm possibility I think if a queen is about to be superseded the drones know it. Like young men they like to hang around where there might be some action.
I've seen several queens superseded when I thought they were doing a great job. Probably has to do with their QMP which I feel is tied to how many drones they mated with.

[Jen]

What is QMP?

[Perry]

Queen Mandibular Pheromone.

[Jen]

Thanks Perry 

[tbonekel]

Queen Mandibular Pheromone.

There you go Jen. I think that cleared things right up, don't you? Like mud!

[Perry]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_mandibular_pheromone   

[tbonekel]

Excellent Perry! Thanks!

[brooksbeefarm]

Left this mourning at 7:00am got home around 7:30pm worked 4 outyards.(157 mile round trip) I found two more hives that had more drones than usual, to my way of thinking,They had two deeps for brood and two med. supers on top with the top super mostly drone brood and about every other bee a drone? I stood it up and looked at the bottom and found 9 queen cups( total) on the bottom two frames with nothing in them, the bottom super was mostly worker brood with some drone brood on the top andf bottom of some of the frames.The bottom deep was almost all hatched out, the second deep was full of worker brood (8 fuii frames)  two frames had eggs and larva and the queen on one.I rotated the two deeps put a queen excluder on top of the top deep and put the two med. supers on top of it and added two more med. supers. I done both of the two hives the same way, but didn't find the queen in one of them. Many times i've found excessive amount of drones in supers and the queen cups are being drawn out. Kind of puts a keep on edge. Jack