Last year I had two drone laying queens from one set of grafts.  Both started laying late.  About four weeks or more after the nucs were given ten day old grafts.  Both laid an excellent pattern in worker comb, but every cell was drone.  I have some questions.

1.  I have been told I really had laying workers, not drone laying queens.  I was told a drone laying queen lays in drone cells only.  This makes no sense to me.  Particularly when looking at a solid deep frame covered with sealed brood and hardly an open cell other than the normal open areas at the top and end of the frame with no brood at all.  I just do not see laying workers producing that many eggs fast enough.  Besides, I saw what looked like a queen to me.  And, how could a queen know she did not have sperm available to fertilize an egg?  Queens that run out of sperm do not lay only in drone cells as far as I know.

2.  I have been told drone laying queens have always taken mating flights and will not lay without those flights and finding a drone to mate with but did it when too old to mate effectively.  This also makes no sense to me.  I do not think laying workers take mating flights and mate with a drone before they start laying.  I really do not know what triggers the ovaries to start to produce eggs, but question if anything in semen is essential.  The II guys use a second treatment with carbon dioxide to trigger the queens into egg laying.  That sure is far from the experience of a mating flight.  My impression is this second carbon dioxide treatment simply speeds up the start of egg laying and they would lay eventually without it.  I could well be wrong in this thinking?

3.  Is it a mistake to put a ripe queen cell into a new nuc stocked with a frame that has lots of eggs and open brood?  Would such a frame inhibit the sexual development of the new queen much as it inhibits laying workers resulting in a queen that mates later than normal or even turning into a drone layer?

Anyone care to comment on any of these questions?

Dick

" Any discovery made by the human mind can be explained in its essentials to the curious learner."  Professor Benjamin Schumacher talking about teaching quantum mechanics to non scientists.   "For every complex problem there is a solution which is simple, neat and wrong."  H. L. Mencken

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