Pete, what we are dealing with here is the loose application of terminology.
From Wikipedia:
"Inbreeding is reproduction from the mating of parents who are closely
related genetically. Inbreeding results in increased homozygosity, which
can increase the chances of offspring being affected by recessive or
deleterious traits...An individual who results from inbreeding is referred
to as *inbred*."

Inbreeding is easy to understand with diploid populations, since each
individual possesses two alleles for each gene.  The inbreeding is the
result of bringing together two haploid germ cells from related parents to
create a new dipoid individual.

The concept of being inbred means that a diploid individual has identical
alleles at each gene locus.  This can be a problem if any of those alleles
are defective, since they cannot be masked by the present of a nondefective
allele.

A drone bee is essentially a flying haploid sperm cell, since both it and
all it's sperms are clones--at the organism level a drone is simply a germ
cell of its mother.  So it is a stretch to say that a drone is "inbred,"
since every drone has only one form of allele at each locus.

 Wikipedia also notes that:
"Livestock breeders often practice controlled breeding to eliminate
undesirable characteristics within a population, which is also coupled with
culling of what is considered unfit offspring, especially when trying to
establish a new and desirable trait in the stock."

And this is exactly what honey bee haploid/diploid reproduction does each
generation--by virtue of drones being haploid, they cull out any
deleterious alleles or allelic combinations.

-- 
Randy Oliver
Grass Valley, CA
www.ScientificBeekeeping.com

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