S.A. Glushkov (Advice to a beekeeper. - M., 1961) and others know that drone bees are bred only in spring and summer, during warm weather, when mating with queens is possible. Each family can breed several thousand drones per season, although 6-8 mate with a queen. They live for about two months. Drones often fly into the hives of other colonies, from which the bees do not expel them, especially if they are preparing for swarming or breeding young queens.
Despite the large (approximately 25%) departure of bees during the winter of 2012/13, after transplanting into a new disinfected hive, the colony quickly got stronger. The bees flew well, brought the bees. At the beginning of June, all the frames of the nesting and store buildings were incubated. There were no drones to be seen. By July 1, all store frames were filled from top to bottom with honey, and a week later they were sealed.
By mid-July, over time, their number increased. During August and September at an air temperature of 15...20°C and until the end of October at a temperature of 12...15°C, they flew out of the hive and freely returned to it. Especially many drones flew out and returned on October 8 at an air temperature of 14°C. It seemed that they had gathered in this hive from all over the area.
September 8 on 12 frames containing about 35 kg of feed. There were a lot of bees - they sat tightly around all the frames. Drones again remained in the winter.
As a result of a spring audit on March 24 at a temperature of 18°C, I found that the colony overwintered satisfactorily, the bees sat on all 12 frames, each had 0.5-1 kg of honey. In the central frame, opposite the letkov was, which indicated the presence of a fetal uterus. Bees fly confidently, actively, some bring yellow bees. Therefore, it can be concluded that bees sometimes leave drones in the winter if there is a fetal queen in the colony.
A.B.SOKOLOV
j-l "Beekeeping" No. 5, 2014
These are the males of the bee family. They do not participate in the collection of food - nature has not adapted them for this. Drones can't even take food from stocks, so worker bees feed them. They are larger than worker bees, but slightly shorter than the fetal queen. Their length is 15-18 mm, weight is 220-256 mg. Drones born in a bee cell weigh 160-177 mg. They have a better sense of smell and vision than bees. This is necessary for them to quickly find queens in the air. Drones don't have a sting, so they can't defend themselves or kill or offend anyone. Their brains are smaller than those of worker bees or queens. The only purpose of drones is to inseminate the uterus. In addition, by their presence among the bees, they help them regulate the temperature inside the nest. Each bee family at the end of spring (most often in mid-May, and in good weather and at the end of April) begins to hatch drones. This instinct captures the bees so much that they convert even foundation and honeycombs with bee cells into drone cells, and also build up all the free sections of combs in the nest with drone cells. For feeding 1 kg of drones, 4800 g of honey and 3600 g of perga are required. There are about 4000 drones in 1 kg. According to our research, one drone in the nest eats an average of 4 mg of food per hour, and during the flight - 41 mg per hour. Out of 24 hours (day), the drone spends 23 hours in the nest and 1 hour in flight, spending 133 mg. For 1 kg of drones, a family spends 532 g of honey per day, or 15.96 kg per month. For 3 summer months, 1 kg of drones eats almost 0.5 centners of food.
It is clear that it is advisable to keep drones only in breeding families. Drones reach puberty immediately after birth, but they are not suitable for mating, they need 10-14 days of training flights. The uterine substance (pheromone) is a bait for drones, therefore it should be considered as a sex hormone, and, inside the hive and near the ground, they do not react to this smell. It begins to act on them only at a height of 3-10 m from the ground. The drones, attracted by the scent of the pheromone, follow the queen against the wind. Drone gathering places can be near the apiary, or they can be 7 km or more away from the families.
Our experiments, carried out in an apiary in the Kolyvan region, showed that drones, flying out of the nest, take a supply of food for 40-67 km. They perfectly remember their hive, so they always return home, but if the drone gets lost, then in the summer it will be accepted at any apiary, in any family as the most honored guest. In all our experiments, the tagged drones always returned home.
In summer, there are 2 - 3 thousand drones in the family. The colony can breed even more of them so that the queen spends as little time as possible meeting them. This, in turn, reduces the danger of her colliding with enemies (hornet, philant, birds). When there are many drones, they fly behind the queen like a comet. The first one to catch up with the queen mates with her and dies instantly, while the queen mates with the second, third, and so on. Some of the drones die while chasing the queen: their genitals are ejected in flight, and the drone immediately dies. When the queen finishes mating, she returns to the nest under the protection of the bees. Approximately half of the young queens do not have time to fully mate with the drones on the first day, so on the second day such a flight is repeated. To save feed and fight against varroatosis, it is necessary to use building frames in the apiary. During the alignment of combs, it is necessary to fill the frames with full sheets of artificial foundation and give the family 6 frames with foundation and 1 store frame with the firstfruits. On the magazine frame, the bees build a drone comb, and the queen lays eggs in the cells. Females of the varroa jacobsoni mite also enter these cells and lay their eggs. After sealing the drone brood, the beekeeper cuts out the comb with drones and puts it in a solar wax melter, and returns the frame to the family. Thus, the bees satisfy the instinct of building drone cells, perfectly rebuilding the artificial foundation, and the number of mites in the colony decreases. In addition, the family lives without drones, saving food. This technique was used by the famous Siberian beekeeper D. G. Naichukov.
For breeding purposes, breeding families are allowed to build drone combs and breed full-fledged breeding drones. In autumn, after the end of the flow, in normal colonies, the bees not only stop feeding the drones, but push them away from open honey to the extreme frames where the honey is sealed. The drones can't print it, so they have to starve. After that, the bees begin to drive them out of the hive, and those who stubbornly climb into the notch are killed and thrown away. If a drone gets into someone else's hive in the summer, the bees accept it, and in the fall they kill it. If there is drone brood in the colony, the bees throw it out as well.
If the bees are driven out by drones, then the honey flow is over and there is a fetal queen in the hive. In many families, the drones sit in a bunch on the arrival board - the bees do not let them go further, in other families, the bees leave the entrance on drones on horseback.
Bee families that do not have fetal queens, or queenless ones, as well as colonies with tinder bees or tinder queens, not only do not expel drones, but even accept those expelled from other hives. Very rarely, bee colonies with a fetal queen leave drones until late autumn. There were cases (in 1967), for example, when in normal colonies the bees did not have time to destroy the drones in time and killed them already in the winter hut in the first week.
Three days later, a small white larva emerges from the egg laid by the queen. Worker bees provide her with abundant food, and at first she literally swims in milk, mixing old with fresh. The larva is very voracious, bees feed it up to 1000 times a day, so its growth ends in six days. After that, the larva stretches along the cell and begins to spin a cocoon, while the bees seal the cell with a thin convex wax cap that lets air through. Then the larva freezes and turns into a pupa.
The laid eggs are called sowing, the larval stage is called open brood, and from the moment of sealing until the release of the bee, closed or printed brood. Care of worker bees for the brood is not limited to feeding the larvae. The brood needs care from the egg stage to the exit of the bee, and a constant temperature: plus 35°-36°.
When it gets cold, thousands of bees gather on the brood to maintain the required temperature. On hot days, they, on the contrary, spread over other cells. If the temperature, despite this, continues to rise, the bees bring water into the hive and, holding drops on their proboscis or covering the honeycomb structures with the thinnest water film, flap their wings, contributing to the evaporation of water. They also maintain constant humidity in the nest. Violation of temperature and humidity conditions leads to freezing of the brood or to the fact that the bees are born without wings. The development of a bee from an egg to an adult insect lasts an average of 21 days, the queen - 5 days less, the drone - 3 days more.
Diet is crucial for the development of queens or bees. The larvae of worker bees in the first 3 days of life receive royal jelly. On the 4th day, they are also given a slurry of honey and bee bread. The last 3 days the larvae of worker bees feed only on a mixture of honey and perga.
The larvae of future queens feed exclusively on royal jelly, of which they receive more and more. chemical composition than other larvae. This royal jelly contains about 10 times more pantothenic acid, biopterin, than the milk of worker bees. But it has not yet been finally established, thanks to which substance, which is part of the royal jelly, the uterus develops from the larva.
The appearance of drones or worker bees depends on the queen and worker bees. For drone brood, bees build larger cells, and the queen lays unfertilized eggs in them. Thus, worker bees play a major role in the emergence of drones.
Primitive man learned about bees and their main product - honey - at a time when he was still using stone tools. The acquaintance of a person with a bee family ended in its death, as a person robbed the bees, ruined the nest and took away honey and brood. Bee and drone brood, like honey, was eaten by a person (in some African countries, the brood is still used for food). But over time, people realized that the complete extermination of the bee family is unprofitable, it is more rational to place the swarm in a new dwelling and take honey and wax from the bees in parts for a long time. People began to arrange a dwelling for bees, which we now call a hive. Man made the first hives similar to those in which bees lived in hollows of trees and caves. These hives are called non-separable, it was impossible to inspect the nest in them. These include a board, a deck, a hollow, a sapetka, depressions in the hills. Such hives can be found in our time, but after the invention of the frame hive by the Russian beekeeper P.I. Prokopovich in 1814, almost all beekeeping switched to collapsible frame hives.
There are a lot of designs of frame hives, and their description would result in a solid essay on several volumes. Our story will be short. Since 1950, it has been recommended to use only 4 hive designs in production. To decide which one is best for a given farm, you need to know the requirements for the hive, that is, the requirements for the hive as a home for bees and as an inventory with which the beekeeper will constantly work. It should be emphasized that the hive itself does not produce honey, therefore, when for propaganda purposes they write that a multi-hull hive produces 35-45% more honey than a sunbed or double-hull hive, and some even write that it is three times more, it is a deliberate deception. Since the time of P. P. Korzhenevsky and L. Langsgrot, many experiments have been carried out and it has been convincingly proved that honey collection does not depend on the design of the hive, but only on the strength of the bee colony and the technology of caring for bees.
Requirements for a hive as a home for bees.
In the hive, the bees should be comfortable and well. This means that it should be warm, dry, with enough fresh air and space. The volume of the nest should be such that bee colonies in the period of the highest development, brood, food reserves are freely accommodated in it, and there would still be enough space for storing honey. The nest in the hive should expand and shrink freely to match the number of bees. A weak family in a large nest will not warm the brood. In summer, the hive must protect the bees from heat, wind and rain, in winter from cold, drafts, dampness and enemies.
Requirements for the hive as an inventory.
The performance of the beekeeper depends on the design of the hive. If, with uncomfortable hives, the beekeeper manages with one apiary, then with convenient ones, he manages to take care of two. A complex, uncomfortable hive causes a lot of unnecessary, unproductive work. It is impossible to give such advice that would satisfy everyone, since local conditions and features of the economy, the taste and habits of the beekeeper play an important role here, but some recommendations are general. There should be only one hive design in the apiary, then the same parts will fit different hives. If there are several of them, the beekeeper will get confused in covers, frames, magazines, and labor productivity in such an apiary will be very low. It is desirable to have frames of the same size, since it is inconvenient to use frames and half frames in one hive.
All frames in the hive must be accessible for inspection. In this sense, hives-loungers are more convenient than risers. To inspect the lower or upper case in the riser, you need to lift the upper magazine or case weighing 30 - 67 kg, put it down, and then lift it and install it back. Therefore, it is necessary to work with risers together.
The hive should be light, so that it can be conveniently transported for bribes, transferred from the winter hut to the apiary and from the apiary to the winter hut, disinfected, and so on. The hive must be cheap, which is achieved by the simplicity of the design, so all sorts of arrivals, a significant number of small parts must be discarded in advance. A hive with smaller frames and more individual parts will always be more expensive than a hive with larger frames and fewer parts.
Bees are among those insects that are not able to exist alone. They live in families consisting of adults, larvae, and a queen. The female is considered to be the main mother in the family. Each family is independent, which causes constant battles between different families. Drones may appear in the hive, acting as a protective barrier during cold weather, and also participating in the process of mating with the uterus.
The uterus is the head of the bee family
According to biological features, there are:
- many drones;
- maternal individual - uterus;
- bees.
The maternal individual plays a decisive role in the process of family organization. She appears along with the larvae, then the bees feed her. It differs from other individuals in that it grows and develops very quickly. She has an elongated body. With the help of drones, the mother individual is fertilized during the flight. The drones die immediately. The queen then returns to the hive to start laying eggs.
In a day, she is able to lay about two thousand oblong-shaped eggs. You can expect the appearance of drones when the eggs are not fertilized. Worker bees emerge from the fertilized eggs.
The appearance of the drone in the family
Tinder bees can appear if the mother begins to get sick or dies. The presence of drones in a bee family can lead to the extinction of all individuals. In this situation, it is necessary to replace the old uterus. More about.
Drones are male. They are large, strong, move quickly, adapt to environment. However, they do not function as worker bees. In addition, they cannot become a good and effective rear, as they lack a sting, poison.
Drones do not have the opportunity to feed themselves, so they eat what the worker bees bring. The bees drive out the drones, as they lose all the honey collected after the flyby. Males are quite lazy, calm, their role in the family is assigned to the fact that they inseminate the uterus and die. For this reason, many bees kick them out on their own. Insects try to get rid of drones with all their might. Males are an integral part of the bee family. Most often, they live during summer period, and then expelled by insects from the hives.
Despite the fact that males cannot perform many of the functions of bees, they cannot be completely eliminated. Otherwise, the bee colony can become sluggish, passive and lethargic. However, many beekeepers expel drones completely, as drone brood is prone to varroosis.
The role of worker bees in the family
All roles are distributed in the family, so each individual is responsible for performing certain functions and actions.
Bees perform the following roles:
- Scout. This role is assigned to the most active and mobile individuals, whose task is to find nectar. They follow coloration, buzz and floral scent. Having found the right source, the bees receive nectar, and then go with it to the hive, inform the rest of the family about the find.
- Picker. After waiting for the scouts, such insects gather in a huge group to go for nectar.
- Receptionist. When the gatherers bring the nectar, other insects join in to stack it in the cells. After that, the processing of nectar begins.
- Watchman. These individuals are responsible for the preservation of the hive and its contents, as they are able to distinguish their own from others. To prevent the theft of honey products, it is stored in the back as well as the top of the bee nest. In autumn, the letok is smeared with propolis.
- Cleaners. Such insects keep order and cleanliness. He carries away all the garbage twenty meters from his dwellings.
- Cleaners. These bees are responsible for the mother, making sure that she can properly lay her eggs. Thus, safe egg production is ensured. Strong families without any problems form many cells intended for queen eggs. Similar results are absent in weak bee colonies, because there are no cleaners in their composition.
Each insect in the family is responsible for performing certain functions. Since drones are needed only for mating, insects try to get rid of them by any means.
Drones are the males of the bee colony. Drones are born weighing 165 - 175 milligrams. Drones are larger than regular worker bees and slightly shorter than the fetal queen. The length of adults is about 15-18 millimeters, and the weight is 220-225 milligrams.
They do not participate in the gathering of food - their nature is not suitable for this. They have a shortened proboscis. If there is no honey in the nest, the drones will most likely die. Drones work exclusively with their jaws, they are fed by worker bees.
Not one drone has yet been seen that would sit on a flower, even if it is full of nectar. They have a more developed sense of smell and vision than bees. They need this in order to quickly find queens in the air. Also, drones do not have a sting, so they cannot protect themselves, offend anyone or kill, and, accordingly, cannot take part in protecting the nest from theft and protection from enemies. Their brains are smaller than the queens or worker bees. The only purpose of the drones is the insemination of the uterus. In addition, by their presence among the bees, they help them regulate the temperature inside the nest.
At the end of spring, each bee family (most often in mid-May) begins to breed drones. Given their instinct captures the bees so much that they begin to remake honeycombs with bee cells and foundation into drone cells, and also completely build up absolutely all free areas for honeycombs in the nest with drone cells.
For feeding one kilogram of drones, approximately 4800 grams of honey and 3600 grams of perga are required. There are about 4,000 drones in one kilogram. According to research, 1 drone in the nest eats about 4 mg of food per hour, during the flight - 41 milligrams per hour.
Out of 24 hours (day), the drone is in the nest for about 23 hours and only 1 hour is in flight. A family spends 532 grams of honey per day for 1 kg of drones, or 15.96 kg per month. For three summer months, one kg of drones eats almost 0.5 centners of food. It is extremely clear that it is advisable to keep drones only in breeding families.
Drones reach sexual maturity immediately after birth, but they are not yet suitable for mating, first they need training flights in 10-14 days. The uterine substance is a bait for drones, therefore it is considered as a sex hormone, and near the ground and inside the hive, they do not react to this smell at all. It begins to affect them only at a height of about 3-10 meters from the ground. And the drones, attracted by the smell of the pheromone, follow the queen and fly against the wind. Sites for collecting drones can be either near the apiary, or they can be 7 km away from families or more.
Drones, flying out of the nest, take a supply of food with them for about 40-67 km. They remember their hive well, and therefore they always return home, but if the drone still gets lost, then in the summer it can be accepted at any apiary, in absolutely any family, and as the most honored guest.
In the summer, there are about 2-3 thousand drones in the family. The bee family can bring them out even more so that the queen spends as little time as possible meeting with them. In turn, this reduces the danger of the uterus colliding with enemies (birds, hornet, philant). When there are a lot of drones, they fly behind the queen like a comet. And the first one who catches up with the queen begins to mate with her and immediately dies, and the queen continues to mate with the second, the third, and so on. dies instantly.
When the queen finishes mating, she immediately returns to the nest under the protection of the bees. About half of the young queens do not have time to fully mate with the drones on the first day, so the same flight is repeated on the second day.
To combat varroatosis and to save feed, it is necessary to use building frames in the apiary. During the alignment of combs, you need to fill the frames with full sheets of artificial foundation and also give the family 6 frames with foundation and one store frame with the firstfruits.
The bees build a drone comb on the magazine frame, and the queen begins to lay eggs in the cells. And females of the varroa jacobsoni mite can enter the same cells to also lay eggs. After the drone brood is sealed, the beekeeper cuts out the drone comb and places it in a solar wax melter, and then returns the frame to the family. Thus, the instinct of building drone cells is satisfied in bees, perfectly building artificial foundation, thereby reducing the number of mites in the bee colony. In addition, the colony, starting to live without drones, saves food. D.G. Naichukov, a famous Siberian beekeeper, used this technique.
Breeding families for breeding purposes are allowed to build drone combs, breed full-fledged breeding drones. In autumn, when the flow ends, in normal bee colonies, the bees stop not only feeding the drones, but pushing them to the extreme frames from the open honey, where the honey is sealed. The drones cannot print it, and therefore they have to starve. Then the bees begin to drive them out of the hive, and those who stubbornly climb into the notch are immediately killed and thrown away. If a lost drone gets into someone else's hive in the summer, the bees will accept it, and if in the fall, they will kill it. If the colony has a drone brood, then the bees throw it away.
When the bees begin to expel the drones, this means that the honey flow has ended and there is a fetal queen in the hive. In most colonies, the drones sit in a separate pile on the arrival board - the bees do not let them go further, and in other colonies, the bees can leave the entrance on the drones.
Having no fetal queens, otherwise queenless bee colonies, as well as a colony with tinder bees or tinder queens, not only leave drones, but even accept strangers expelled from other hives. But very rarely, bee families that have a fetal queen are left in the drone hive until late autumn. There were cases, for example, when even in normal families the bees did not have time to destroy the drones in time and killed them already in the first week in the winter hut.