Beekeepers can flood a mating area with drones by placing multiple apiaries within 1 km of a central site. The Italian technique cuts Dadant frames diagonally so one half produces worker brood and the other half produces drones, a method that outperforms seasonal starter strips. Drones take 24 days to develop, then weeks more to mature sexually.
If you want to increase the amount of drones available for mating flights in your area, I'm going to show you how to do it now. Now, there's various methods for producing drone brood. Drone brood normally takes 24 days to emerge, and then it can take up to another couple of weeks after that for those drones to become sexually mature and able to actually mate with queens. Now, if you're in a nice secluded area of the country, or you just want to improve the genetics of the drones that are up in the air, you can do something called drone flooding. Now, drone flooding in the same apiary that you're trying to get mating flights is okay, but what's better than that is having your mating site in the middle and then a 1-kilometer radius all around it. Get as many drone satellite apiaries as you can possibly get, and it's on those satellite sites that you should flood with your drones. Now, now creating those drones is really, really easy. You can do it a number of different ways. What some people like to do is put full sheets of drone foundation in, and then the bees will just draw them out, turn that into drone brood, and away you go. Another way of doing it is using starter strips. That's just where you take a piece of wax, stick it to the top bar, and then let the bees draw it down naturally. Do that in April and May, and I guarantee they will fill it all with drone brood. Do it in August and September, probably going to be worker brood. So that one there is time dependent, and sometimes it is difficult to get the wax strips to stick to the top of the bar. If you want to know a foolproof way to do that, you have to hit the subscribe button though, because I've got a really cool video to show you the best method for sticking starter strips in a beehive. But the method I'm going to show you here today in Italy is Genius. I absolutely love it. This is what they do. In Italy, they use Dadant frames and they have vertical wires embedded on the frame. What they then do is they take a single sheet of foundation, cut it diagonally like you can see here, and then instead of embedding the entire wax sheet onto those wires, you're just embedding that right-angled triangle. So half of the frame is worker brood and the other half is empty. Add that into your hive in April and May and the bees will draw that out perfectly. On the worker brood side, it will just be worker brood. And on that space, if you do it in April and May, they will fill that with drone brood. I really like this method. This is gonna be my new method because I really do not like starter strips. They are a pain. And also, I don't really wanna go out and buy specific drone brood foundation where the bees can create it naturally if I can get away with it. So I'm just gonna focus on having worker brood foundation and just cutting a diagonal strip out like that. Now this one here is specifically designed for frames that are pre-wired, but you can also do this with pre-wired foundation. All I would suggest doing is putting the foundation into the hive normally and then getting some really sharp scissors or some snips and just cutting out the remaining triangle to give you that difference. So you've got half that's worker brood, half that's drone brood. Super simple. I'll show you how it works now. So there we go. Guy was showing you that there. This side here, the bees have drawn out worker brood, which you can see. And then over on this side, the bees have drawn out natural wild drone brood. These are davant frames. So that is a huge amount of drone brood. And in Italy, they do 2 frames like this in every single hive, which means that they're going to be flooding all of the local area with top quality, in this case Continental Gold Star Italian Lagustica drones. I love this system. Absolutely brilliant.
