2022 German Breeder Queen

Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. I thought it'd be useful just to show you the queens that I'm acquiring. I plan to breed quite a lot of queens next year, and I want some queens to breed from, some queens to graft from, and then I want some really good stock to have as drone mothers as well. I've identified my very best apiary in terms of what I'm going to use as a breeding apiary, and I'm going to cover that in a separate video, and I'm going to tell you why I think it's a fantastic breeding apiary down there. So all of these queens, I'll be transferring them down there, the main queens that I'm going to breed from in terms of actually going and grafting from. Then I'm going to select some of my colonies in terms of the best colonies that I've got for temperament, for honey production, for disease resistance, and I'll bring the best of the best all down to the breeding apiary to boost the drone population that's down there and hopefully come up with some really nice genetic diversity down there and some top quality queens. However, my latest acquisition is a German Buckfast queen. It's an island-mated queen. Some really top-quality queens out in Germany. Their Buckfast breeding program is exceptional, and it's some of the best breeder queens that you can get in Europe. It's not an artificially inseminated queen, so it's not a true purebred F0 queen, but it is island-mated. The drones are controlled, so you should be able to get some reasonable F2s off her if you want to call her an F1. But she's probably somewhere in the middle of that. Not perfectly pure, but a very pure drone-controlled queen. So there's my queen there. It's actually really useful for me doing these videos because I can go back and check and take a look at the actual breeder queen and the records that come on the cage and link it back to any certificates that I get as well. You can see there the breeder queen right in the middle, and I always find whenever I get the breeder queen packages over from Germany or Denmark or wherever I get them from, The bees that come with it, the attendants, they're so nice and placid. And you never know, is that a sign of what's to come? Hopefully it is. But the reason I've gone for this German breeder queen is due to the fact that they've got really excellent temperament. I'm going to assess what she's like next year. I'm not going to say, right, she's going to be a breeder queen and I'm going to put hundreds of grafts through her. I'm not as confident as I am with the other one that was a blue-marked queen that's had a year to prove herself. This is a white 2021 marked queen. Paid a fair bit of money for this one though, and I'm paying for the quality genetics. But I think I'm going to give her a year to prove herself, and I will follow that up on various videos showing you how well these breeder queens come along. So I'm going to take this queen and I'm going to introduce her into a colony. I'm doing another video at the moment which is how late you can requeen a colony, how late you can go into the season. So if you're interested in that, Subscribe to the channel because it's a really interesting topic. See how late we can push it this year. But I'm not going to cover that on this video. I just wanted to give you a really quick update in terms of the breeder queens that I've got. I've got a few this year now. So I've got 2 Danish Buckfasts from a very reputable Danish breeder. I've got one really, really well-respected German breeder. And then I've got my F0 artificially inseminated queen from a top-secret breeder that I'm not telling anyone about just yet. I'm going to run Lots of grafts of all of these breeder queens. I'm not going to go and do 100 off this one here because like I say, I've not tested any of them. The only one that I'm really confident in is that's going to perform because I've seen the evidence that they're going to perform well is that F0 breeder queen. But I'm definitely going to run like say 30 or 40 off all of the breeder queens, and then I'm going to flood the drone areas with those F1 daughters as well. That should give me a really good population of drones and some really good genetic diversity Into the mix of those queens. So that's it for the video. I said it'd be a short one. I hope you enjoyed it. As always, please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time.