eric,

so are you talking about freezing the drone comb and putting it back into the hive, or removing one frame of drone comb and replacing it with an empty one?  in either case, the bees will push towards 15% (more or less) drones in the hive...and i think the very widespread use of worker only foundation masks this concept to the point that most beekeepers don't even know this.  i haven't done this particular experement, but i would imagine that if you freeze a frame of drone brood, and add another empty frame, the bees have to do a fair ammount of work to clean out the dead drones before the queen can lay in them again, which might lead them to draw more drone comb.  personally, i see no point in constantly fighting with the bees about how many drones they need, and i let them hatch out...which is why i have about 70-80 deep boxes full of mostly worker comb drawn without foundation.

we've been doing foundationless for about 4 years, with our best success after abandoning the "starter strips" in favor of the popsicle sticks (at the suggestion of michael bush).  as far as small cell goes, i'm just talking about what we are doing...i don't think i implied that you should be doing this, or even mentioned a "theory". 

fwiw, we were doing foundationless long before deciding to regress to small cell (this year), and it's too early to make any conclusions as to whether it is beneficial or not...but i will say that i have not seen a single mite in a drone cell (which i check weekly) in months (and neither did the bee inspector who checked all of the hives 2 weeks ago), and even when the packages were building up, i never found more than one in a single cell, and never more than 3 out of 30 hives.  i have no idea whether small cell is responsible for this or not, but it makes me feel very comfortable letting the drones hatch out.

deknow

-- Eric Brown <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
although I was seeing a huge amount of drone brood, I was keeping the 
number of actual hatched out drones very low. 
...
I find the way that small cell theories intrude on every conceivable 
thread extremely tedious.

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