Kill all the males!

As the weather starts to turn cold something subtle changes in a beehive. The workers stop feeding the drones and they become less tolerant of their presence in general. The more cold weather you have the farther this goes. By the time you get your first frost the workers can be seen dragging drones out of the hive by their wings or legs! Something I see every year is what you see pictured here: workers refusing to let drones into the hive in the evening. By morning the drones are dead in the grass from exposure.

I saw something I haven't seen before last week, I saw the workers removing drone brood! When the weather is warm a hive keeps male bees around so they can mate with virgin queens from other hives but when the weather gets cold there are no queens to mate with so the male bees only consume resources and don't benefit their hive anymore. Since it got cold quickly the queen was still producing young male bees when the hive decided to get rid of them. This mean that the young males had to go too, including the two you see in the picture to the right. Healthy young bees are white like what you see here, although these two won't be healthy for long. The workers are biting them and will soon carry the larva away and drop them in the grass.