Tibor Szabo Senior did some work back in 1984 and 1985 on distance from drone colonies that queen bees mated.  The abstract can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00218839.1986.11100722 

When I was queen bee breeding we had drone colonies within a couple of kilometres of the mating yards.  Sometimes we were able to situation a drone yard in a central position to several mating yards.  Others times we had the drone colonies in the same yard as the mating nucs.

In the early days of our business when we had Dr. Cam Jay come and visit us in 1988.  We did some work on semen stored in the spermatheca with Cam and he showed us his method of sperm counting.  This was the method he used to check queens for the Bee Maid Co-Op in Winnipeg to make sure the queens coming to Manitoba were well mated.  Our levels were satisfactory in all situations so I guess there was no right place to have the drone colonies.

As an aside, Cam had come out to be our main speaker at the Second Australian and International Bee Congress in 1988 and I recall at one session on queen breeding at the Congress that Dr. Jerzy Woyke from Poland was reprimanding some scientists on their calculations of sperm in the spermatheca in a paper they were presenting.  Jerzy said that the numbers they obtained were not possible.

If I don't get the chance compliments of the season to all Bee-Lers.

Trevor Weatherhead
Australia

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