Drone culling is one way of reducing the numbers of varroa mites in a hive and is something I do throughout the active season. Once a colony has reached the 6-7 frames of brood stage I remove one of the outer frames and place a super frame in the middle of the brood chamber, maintaining the 11 frames I use in a national brood chamber. Because this frame is shorter than a normal brood frame the bees will construct 'wild' comb on the bottom of it and invariably the wild comb will be drone. Once the majority of the drone has been capped I cut the wild drone comb from the bottom of the frame and place the frame back in its place in the brood chamber, ready for the cycle to repeat. The removed drone comb will be checked for varroa before being recycled.
The life cycle of drones is better suited to varroa than either workers or Queens, so they prefer to lay their eggs in a drone cell, by removing this wild drone comb on a regular basis it is easy to monitor the levels and reduce the numbers of varroa.
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