> I find that by giving them a place to do so 
> [draw drone cells], they don't build it elsewhere.  

The interesting thing is that when you cut out 
all that drone comb, they DO make ad-hoc drone 
cells elsewhere, rather than waiting for the 
comb to be re-drawn.

The sudden lack of drone brood in spring prompts 
the bees to convert empty worker cells to drone cells.  
They are not going to politely wait for the drone 
frame to be drawn out again, now are they?  No - 
drones are as important to the colony's agenda as 
swarming is.

The folks who freeze and reinsert drone frames won't 
see the problem, as the bees go right to work removing 
the dead drone brood, and re-use those same drone cells.

So your report is something that I would consider
very unusual bee behavior.  Also, as one gets further 
into summer, I'd expect less and less interest in 
re-drawing the cut-out drone frame, and more re-use 
of wax to rework existing worker cells into drone cells.

> Seeley, in the study that you cited, found the 
> same to be true.

No, Seeley never removed any drone comb at all.

What he found was that colonies given 4 frames of 
drone foundation did not draw any additional drone 
comb in the "worker" frames.  But those combs were 
never removed during the study period.

> There is ample evidence that the presence of 
> varroa at any level will suppress honey production.

The classic case of the best honey-producing 
colonies being the ones that crash on Labor Day 
tends to refute that correlation, so I'm not so 
sure that varroa can be blamed for poor crops.  
I've always found that honey crops track the 
weather, while colony survival tracks varroa level.

Also, Seeley said in the paper "I found no such 
correlation between the rankings of colonies 
according to their mite levels and honey yields."

It is clear that when varroa levels are high, 
colonies crash, and crashing colonies consume 
their stores rather than bringing home more
groceries, but I've found that Nosema was a 
bigger issue for "poor crops" than any other 
disease/pest issue.  Nosema tracked lower hive 
weight every time, except for cases where hives 
went queenless at the bloom, and this was 
merely Nosema apis.

If it was as easy as "varroa reduces crops"
one could look at pounds per hive at first
pull of honey, and make treatment decisions
based solely upon pounds harvested versus
the mean for colonies of equivalent size.

But it isn't that simple, even if you look
at data from all three pulls of supers, and
go back and look at the outliers on both
ends of the bell curve.  

> An ancillary question that I have is just how 
> critical is it to remove every round of drone 
> brood produced.  

I call drone frames "varroa hand grenades".
Hold on to them too long, and they go boom.  :)

> I found several colonies in my operation last summer that 
> I had inadvertently left drone trap frames in through the 
> season, without removal, other than twice in the spring.  
> Those colonies did not exhibit higher mite levels than 
> "control" colonies side by side.  Indeed, some of them had
> extremely low mite levels, despite the presence of a drone frame!

This is another very unusual report.  
How dry was the weather?
I might understand if all colonies had low mite levels
and the air humidity had been really dry.

(I'm assuming here that the drone frame was being used for
drone brood rather than for stores, which is something 
another guy sent me a photo of for my collection of 
"bees do the strangest things" pix.)

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