a Charles Linder snip followed by > my comments.. 
Wow,  great information!    Gene ,  can you elaborate a bit on the proper ways to sample drones?  Personaly I wouldn’t have thought anything of it!

>probably more elaboration than you wanted?

>First I had to make up drone collection cages which I had never seen before but Dr Rangel found a picture and I made 3 or 4<basically a square box with queen excluder material on the top and bottom with a small hole in one side for hand loading the drones.  Since I knew absolutely nothing about trying to capture live sexually mature drones at the time the student and I winged it at first < hives pre id as having large drone population could make this go pretty well.  I have never been able to successfully catch queens or drones with gloves so all of this with no gloves so I took a lot of whacks in the process.  We could have likely timed this better since we caught in the late am in (heat of the day in Texas) primarily due to the semen needing to back to the lab at a very specific time in afternoon.  Spraying a bit of water or thin syrup on the cages seem to help in getting live drones in cages from field to the lab.

>Just a bit after the project started along came Sue C. and she demonstrate how she id's sexually mature drones and provide a few other tips on collecting drones. Basically the young sexually immature kind are a bit soft like a marshmallow and the slightly older ones exoskeleton is tougher and when you press your finger on them gently they 'buzz'. The younger immature kind just kind of set there and DO NOT buzz.  At the lab we call this the 'buzz test'. During the next year Adrian (see name on paper) was marking drones and it was interesting to see how these 'meander' around the apiary < kind of a shock in fact especially when the state apiary inspector is setting there looking over you shoulder and you have no idea why all those drones have this odd looking multi colored 'mold' growing on their thorax.  

>Initial timing (day and season) was all wrong and after Sue C. showed us how to set queen excluder in front of hives and collect drones in the early afternoon it certainly made the collection easier, speedier and less painful.

Gene back in central Texas attending to my bees...
 



    

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