Lloyd Spear wrote:
>an article by Tom Seeley in the June Bee Culture says that if you
>increase the amount of drone brood produced, you will decrease honey
>production.

        I've not read the Seeley article but assume Lloyd's summary is fair.
        I comment that many trends in nature are not monotonic: they do not
increase or decrease continuously over a wide range of the causative
variable but instead exhibit one or more 'turning points of inflexion',
i.e. the sign of the slope of the graph changes at least once  -  the
dependent variable goes thru a peak or trough.
        My supposition would be that this issue of proportion of drone
brood is not of a monotonic kind but of a more complex nature.  Is it
plausible that more is better, indefinitely?  Or that less is better,
indefinitely? (The latter is obviously wrong.)   I believe there will be an
optimum proportion of drone brood  -  which may well be around 10 - 25% of
total brood.
        The question for management then becomes whether we have anything
like the understanding that would be needed to identify that optimum and
intervene to enforce it in a systematic, justified way.  I suggest we have
no basis for imposing any particular proportion of drone brood, even for
some specific circumstances let alone any general rule-of-thumb number.
        As with selection of eggs for new queens, I believe the bees know
better than we do.  The dominance by male-hating political fads in the
overdeveloped world these past few decades should not be permitted to spill
over in the form of anti-drone slogans which have insufficient scientific
justification.
        Anyhow we must rate percentage of drone brood wrt more than one
criterion.  Honey yield is one criterion, but may there not be others too?

R