Interview Blog 1, Colony Dysfunction Disorder & Drones

Cidette Rice
Mr.Roddy
IHSS
5/19/2020

Interview Blog 1, Colony Dysfunction Disorder & Drones

During the process of my challenge project I learned countless things about bees, such as their population makeup, mating habits, and the common problems that affect them. The first client hive I worked on with my mom was drone infested, meaning that of all the bees in the colony 30-45% were drones, rather than the normal 10%. This was caused by the colony rejecting their queen bee and a worker taking up the role of queen. This means that the worker bee had gone from an average bee to laying up to 1500 eggs per day. This would be a normal production of eggs despite the fact that the worker bee cannot mate with the drones, and the drones part is essential in creating worker and queen bees. Without the drone a worker bee can only lay drone eggs, and that is exactly what happened to our client’s hive.
The process of getting rid of this excess of drones would mean replacing frames, splitting the colony, and getting new queens for the two colonies that would result from the split. This is no easy task and would easily require at least a month of monitoring the two new colonies' stability. The active monitoring would be a necessity due to the moderate possibility of colony dysfunction disorder. Colony dysfunction disorder is an event in which a colony abandons its queen  for whatever reason it may have. CDD is what caused the worker bee to take up the role as queen in the first place. While CDD has been down 29% in recent years, it is important to stay alert when splitting two new colonies and adding two new queens due to how many variables are involved in the situation.

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