:s I think the HSC let my bees build up quicker last summer. But you know, now Im thinking Im going to pull one out and check it. The cells will then be capped during the last 14 days of their brood life. During its first ten days, the drone bee will be fed within an open cell. For worker bees, they take 21 days to develop and the queen bee takes 16 days to develop. With the foundationless frames built up next to it you can see the drone comb as well as the smaller worker bee cells. The drone bee takes longer to grow and mature, 24 days in total. Although mite counts varied, we believe that increasing sample size over different seasons and locations could elucidate infestation patterns in drone brood and ultimately improve drone brood removal as an integrated pest management tool for a wider audience of beekeepers. The brood in the green frames have been tightly packed. Our results suggest that drone brood removal is effective in reducing Varroa destructor numbers in colonies, supporting the findings of previous studies on the efficacy of this measure. The number of mites and the proportion of capped cells, however, were not correlated (R2 < 0.01, P < 0.05). In addition, mite counts were significantly higher in June and July than in April and May (Tukey-HSD, P < 0.05). We found that a drone frame carried a median of 71.5 mites, and with the removal of four trap frames, about 286 mites can be removed per colony and season. Mites were washed out from brood collected from mid-April to mid-July based on a standard method to obtain comparable results. Therefore, we sampled a total of 262 drone frames with varying proportion of capped cells (5–100%) from 18 different apiaries. At present, it is mostly unknown how many mites a drone frame can carry at different times of the season, and how many mites can be removed on average if this measure is performed frequently. However, it is considered labour-intensive, and there are doubts about the effectiveness of this measure. Therefore, drone brood removal with trap frames is common practice among beekeepers in Europe and part of sustainable varroa control. Varroa mites are highly attracted to drone brood of honey bees (Apis mellifera), as it increases their chance of successful reproduction.
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