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Hi Karen,

To check frequently, ie. each weekend to 10 days, to see if the green drone frame is capped in the bottom box, and avoid a bad back, I follow a procedure developed accidently while trying to achieve successful combined side by side ( horizontal ) two queen hives. The queens are in side by side single bottom boxes. Both have a green drone brood frame. On top of the boxes with queens above an excluder, are the honey supers, half over one queen's brood box and half over the over. A four frame nuc box top lid serves as a top cover of the bottom boxes where the bottom boxes are not covered by ascending honey supers.

This allows no boxes to be lifted as I pull out green drone brood frames each weekend to check if all cells are capped. If a drone brood frame is capped , I replace it with a new green drone brood frame or return the first removed drone frame a week later after it has been in a freezer for a week. 

If new regular worker brood frames are added to the queen bottom box each visit to create more laying space , 1 or 2 frames of worker brood can be removed and placed in the top box, say box 5, without lifting boxes. A week to 10 days later I return and now the top box has supercedure queen cells from both queens 1-2 days from hatching.  Nucs can be created if desired. In mid August I change the two queen hives back to one queen hives . The former two queen hives with the blue marked carniolian Chilean queens were my best winter survivors. 

Hope this saves your back and allows you to have hundreds of hives. I know articles say drone comb trapping is too work intensive with more than 200 hives.

Are all varroa mites dead after a week in a freezer? that's a question for the experimenters.

Malcolm Connell
Alberta, Canada

> Last season I had 50 hives and 6 of them had two drone trap frames in the 
> top box. I made sure the brood frames did not have a lot of drone cells 
> before putting in the traps.

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