Finally new lectures! We have been waiting for too long! Thank you!

POLLEN is the Drone Comb Alert--I think,once the bees are far enough along in their spring build up, the pollens coming in with nectar sounds the alarm, I also believe that the Equinox and length of the day is a factor ..

How about resources coming in the hive, nectar/pollen quantity and quality, would that make any difference? Because it depends on the time of the year and the foraging area. Thank you for the good speech.

Maybe it's just just contact amount, like rubbing, and rubbing is racing... I mean, rubbing is the cue grasshoppers use to go locust on the world. So I'll go with that mechanism would also be useful for social insects as well.

Awesome, Great presentation. looking forward to more content,

Maybe the amount of workers only effects how fast things get done and they will invest whatever space is available for reproduction because they want a certain size brood nest and certain amount of stores. I think everything revolves around available space in the cavity vs how fast the bees can build. Maybe they spend more time measuring

Thank you

Higher density would probably increase the air pressure inside a hive, yeah? I suspect bees can sense pressure changes. That may be one of their cues to build more drone comb. I suggested it to him when he presented this at a previous conference.

Something missed with this machine, it will be found with a difference in time of year. Do it again in March/April . You will see an increase in production due to moving the air around. This will cause nectar to evaporate faster and give bees more time to draw out comb

But don't the bees detect some of the pheromones via touch (of antennae) so it could be non-volatile pheromones.

Not wanting to throw in a monkey wrench here - but I see no mention of the queen in this. Is there any way a queen might influence when and how much drone cone is made? I'm thinking of a plastic frame or a frame with a full piece of wax as a foundation for comb. I have seen queens go on a new frame as they are just about to draw the comb, and she has put down eggs. Its like a demand - here are eggs. Build me comb NOW. She can determine what kind of eggs she lays - so could she be doing that to force the building of drone comb? You see that in inspections: plastic frames, side walls of cells are barely discernable, and if you look closely you cant miss that there are enough eggs laid there to fill the frame from bottom to 1/4 of the distance from the top - and about that side to side. And you know those workers are hustling to have cells fully formed before they have to cap them! Related question: do the workers then come in - if the queen's laying is not on the correct interval to fit in the worker or drone comb (depending on what kind of egg she has laid) do the bees pull comb and move the eggs into the cells as soon as they start pulling the sides up. Or is the queen able to get the interval correct so its just a road map?

There was one thing he overlooked and that is humidity. In the spring we feed 1:1 syrup to stimulate brood rearing because it mimics a nectar flow by increasing humidity in the hive. Humidity is also affected by temperature, bee density, etc. It is the one signal detected by all bees all the time, queen included. As for the stop building signal, it could simply be the drone exodus that happens every afternoon during summer. Less bees, less respiration, less humidity.