Yesterday I released this same video, and was curious why some viewers asked questions about temperature, time, and more. I thought I answered those questions in the narration.
Well, because I'm super sharp... I listened to part of the video today only to find out I left off the narration (';').
So, here is the narrated version, everything else is the same.
Sorry about that.

This information was also posted on the original video:

Frequent Questions I receive from viewers:
"Why are there thousands of drones entering my hive?
Can drones mate with a virgin queen inside the hive?"

CORRECTION: Drones from a single queen would all be her stock, it's workers that would represent variations based on drones the queen mated with. Sorry about that.

My thought is this -
This colony was split less than two weeks ago with capped queen cells inside.
Though it sounds like a swarm, the bulk of landing board activity is from drones entering and departing.
My hypothesis is, that a virgin queen in this colony may have made her mating flight today.
She would fly to a drone congregation area and become the center of interest for thousands of drones from colonies far and wide.
Drones follow queens so intensely that they form a comet that is often visible to people on the ground.
What if, even though the queen has completed her mating flight, and has copulated with as many drones as she cared to, hundreds if not thousands simply continued to follow her back to the original hive?
This is a pure guess on my part.

There is a normal amount of Drone-Comb inside this hive, less than 20% of this 10 frame triple deep hive. So, a drone laying queen is unlikely. An inspection next week "should" show eggs if today's activity is due to a mating flight.

You can put a virgin queen in a queen cage, attach her to a helium balloon and attract drones pretty fast. Maybe not in the concentrations that would be found in a DCA, but quite a few.

We also know that drones fly at a different altitude than workers do, and can therefore spot a queen headed through their "air space" pretty easily with their enormous eyes.

It seems reasonable that a drone-comet may not break off completely, and this could in theory, explain why a colony of bees with a young queen could be receiving all of these unwelcome visitors.

Further reading, DCAs may have as many as 2000 drones according to this study: [ Ссылка ]

What can you do if you don't want all of those freeloaders in your hive? You can put a drone excluder on the hive. I don't personally do that, but they do exist.

For those looking for Drone Excluders, here they are: [ Ссылка ] ( I am not compensated for sharing this link ).

I'll be interested in your thoughts and observations.

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