If you stroll out to your apiary on a cool autumn day, you may be distressed to find a large number of bees trying to get inside. Are these robber bees, coming to steal your hive's honey before winter? Maybe not! If they look like honey bees but bigger, with big googly eyes, they are the drones, your hive's male bees and they are being evicted all at once in the annual drone eviction before winter.
It's a girls' world
Each year, the workers in a honey bee colony make the same calculation: "It's too late in the year for these drones to mate with any queens, and there won't be any new queens around until the middle of next spring. Should we keep our brothers alive, and care for them through the long, cold winter? Or should we kick them all out the front door, and leave them to starve to death or be picked off by predators, and then just raise a new batch of brothers next year?" Every year, bee colonies make the same harsh decision.
Because the bees are reading the weather cues around them, you'll often see that all the colonies in an apiary evict their drones at the same time. A stroll through the apiary will see hive after hive with a front porch covered in forlorn drones, hoping someone will feed them dinner.
Photos and video taken by Betterbee Head Beekeeper Anne Frey
Keeping drones can signal trouble
It's a fascinating process to observe, but there is one important practical reason to check your hives and see the drone eviction in process. If the colonies in an apiary evict their drones, but one colony does not, it could be a sign of a queen problem in that hive. Queenless colonies, or colonies that are concerned they may become queenless soon, will preserve drones (even drones from neighboring hives) until they are confident that they have a mated queen ready to head into winter. If you see that one of your colonies isn't evicting drones when the others are, it's time for an urgent hive inspection to try to see if anything is wrong.
As we get closer to winter, remember that sometimes the best choice with a struggling colony is just to "call it", and combine them with a strong colony so that the comb, honey, and even bees are put to good use during the coming winter.
Keep an eye on your hives
Drone eviction is a fascinating part of bee biology, and it's worth spying on your bees throughout the fall to see the day that the boys are kicked out.
And while you're observing, spare a sympathetic thought for the poor drones that didn't manage to catch a queen to mate with, and now won't even live to see the first snow of winter.
Photos and video taken by Betterbee Head Beekeeper Anne Frey
