>
> Would one hive have 500 - 1000 mature drones needed to mate with 50 
> queens at any given time?  Queen producers, especially in the north 
> with our short season, raise thousands of queens at a time. Where do 
> the 10-20 drones per mated queen come from?
>

One hive per 50 nucs seems pretty low.     You would need to turn over 
500-1000 new drones every 2 weeks for many operations and have no loss, 
and assume every drone finds a queen.   So a more reasonable number 
would be a a minimum of twice that number of drones produced every two 
weeks, a fairly high number for most colonies.  And hopefully there are 
500 nucs in the yard so there is some genetic diversity in the drone 
pool (ie. 10 drone hives). Not that it can't be done, but would 
definitely take more attention to the drone hives to encourage that 
level of drone production. You can also move capped drone brood from 
other yards to increase both numbers and diversity (and possibly help 
control varroa)

-Tim

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