I was asked to go and take a look at two colonies yesterday.  These were in two level Langstroths with 20 frames per colony.   They were incredibly active, very strong populations which is quite surprising given that the rainy season has started and there is very little nectar about.  It is the norm that queens have a holiday at this time of year and may stop laying or only lay on a few frames.

What was a little curious (in both colonies)  was that on the two outmost frames were totally covered in drones.  Most frames had some drone cells but some had strips of capped drone cells at the bottom of the frames and others had open drone cells or blocks of capped drone cells.

The upper half of many frames has worker eggs / larvae and there are a couple of frames of properly capped brood.

I did not see evidence of any parasites or diseases.  These appeared to be very good colonies.

My thought here was could this be a deficient queen that simply needed replacing.  But then I wondered why this was happening on both colonies, it seems improbable that that both queens would exhibit the same behaviour at the same time.   Does anyone have a view as to what else this could be?

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