Drones 2023

[Jacobs]

I just finished checking shims and adding brown bricks at my home hives. In one of the strongest hives, 3 drones were walking around on the top bars inside the shim. One drone took off and flew. I am not seeing any flying yet during orientation flights. A few of the hives had a small amount of burr comb in the shims. None of the burr comb had eggs or nectar in them.

[Jacobs]

I went through over half of my home hives today. I'll try and get to the rest tomorrow or Wednesday. One hive had capped drone brood at the bottom of some frames and purple eyed drones in comb built between supers.

[Wally]

Time to start grafting........

[reedyfork]

I'm sure everyone else is seeing the same thing this week, but I went through all my 20 hives and had about half with new drawn comb clogging up the feeding shim (built in the past 3 weeks), and maybe 5 actually had capped and purple-eyed drone brood in that comb.

I did see my first drones flying around today...

All had TONS of capped honey still, so I removed any remaining dry sugar, cleaned out and removed the shims, and added a pollen patty to each.