a Peter Borst snip.... 
My hunch is that we are looking at inviable sperm being used by the queen to fertilize eggs intended to be workers. Oddly, one colony that had these had a brand new queen raised "in house."

>some time ago we had a student here that did some work collect drone semen and checking it for viability. a lot of this data was collected from my own hives and at least two other close by beekeeper including one sample (yard) from Danny Weaver's stuff.  I had thought that research would be published but it appears that for various reason it will not.  anyway to cut to the chase the student with cooperation from the vet school used techniques typically used to test for viability in horse semen (with an obvious difference in volume).  pretty interesting stuff in that the technology would distinguish between viable, unviable and soon to be unviable semen.  the last category was much more prevalent than I would have ever thought and no conclusion were made at the time although I suspected time of year and poor nutrition as likely partial causes.

Gene in central Texas 

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