"the percentage of shotgun
 brood, empty or mismatched brood, is variable with each
 queen.  The worst are at about 50%.  There are or were
 good patches of eggs laid, but the hatched brood was
 missing., or widely scattered. "

Ok, now I understand why you said they were diploid drone layers.  It was based on severe shotgun worker brood patterns.  The average, outbred normally mated queen will lay a few % diploid drones scattered in the workers.  As I remember there are 18 known alternatives at the sex determination locus.  So, most queens are going to mate with a drone that matches one of the queens sex determination alleles.

The solid pattern of drone brood in drone comb and the solid egg patterns in worker cells says the problem is not that the queen is laying a shotgun pattern of eggs.  But there are things besides diploid drones that can cause shotgun patterns in worker brood.  I have seen it with EFB for instance.  At least I presume it was EFB even thou I could not see diseased larva as the problem went away totally as soon as I treated with antibiotics.  In my cases I have sometimes seen way over 50% of the brood missing from normal egg patterns. My bees are pretty hygienic and I think often clean out diseased larva before the larva show visible symptoms.  So, I still have to wonder if you really had diploid drone laying queens or if you were seeing the results of hygienic behavior?  I have read some of the early VHS queens produced workers that were so aggressive at cleaning out what they considered bad larva that the hives could not raise enough workers to gain
 strength.

The problem with the diploid drone explanation in my mind is statistically it would be very hard to get many queens that laid 25% to 50% diploid drones no matter how inbred the bees were unless you were dealing with a very small apiary of only one or two hives that were also very isolated.  Even in a non inbred situation one queen in many millions (one in three trillion if she mates with 12 drones and I did the math right) could be such a 50% diploid drone layer by statistical chance.   You say you saw several.  That does not sound like diploid drone laying queens to me.

Nothing I have said implies you did not have a problem.  I am sure you did.  I just question your conclusion.  Have you asked your queen supplier about the problem?

Dick


" Any discovery made by the human mind can be explained in its essentials to the curious learner."  Professor Benjamin Schumacher talking about teaching quantum mechanics to non scientists.   "For every complex problem there is a solution which is simple, neat and wrong."  H. L. Mencken

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