After weeks of development, seven of eight queens show solid worker brood patterns, confirming successful mating. One queen laid only drones. Wait for capped brood to judge mating success, not just eggs, and transfer strong colonies to nucs.
The last video I showed you of my Hyde Hives queen rearing nuc, we went through every single box and we found either eggs, brood in all stages, or we found the queen. I took that, that they were all mated. Just wanted to do this final video in the series though, just to show you what the brood pattern's looking like. It's been plenty of time now for those eggs, those larvae, to have turned into good solid worker brood. I'm gonna go through every single one, pull out the best frame of brood, show you that they've mated really well, and then we'll close this series up because it has been an overwhelming success. Right, so it looks like they've all still got bees in it apart from the fourth one in, which is that one. I reckon that one might have swarmed. Big colonies in small containers— these really do need transferring over to nucs, which I'll do later on this week. All of the rest of them though look pretty good, and I think we'll at least find brood in all of them. So I'll start off at one end, go all the way through. Let's see if all of these queens got mated. Right, colony number 1, we are going to say that that is 100% mated. Beautiful brood pattern. Really nice and condensed. Love the look of that. And by the way, this is an F2 Buckfast queen. Right, next one along. I managed to get the queen out on this one and the first one as well. Beautiful frame of worker brood. Definitely mated. Third one along, not the best brood pattern, but definitely mated. First or second round of brood can always be a little bit like this, and there's lots of pollen interspersed, so that's what's giving it the patchy feel. But definitely mated, definitely got a queen in there. 3 out of 3 so far. And you know me, something goes wrong, we'll always talk about it. 4th one in, they didn't swarm. It's a drone-laying queen. Goes to show you, you always need to confirm that there's worker brood in a good pattern before you start passing off queens as mated. This one here, clearly an issue, clearly a drone-laying queen. That's why I wanted to do this follow-up video, just to double-check, just to make sure they were all indeed really well mated. Quite clear here though, spotty brood, lots of drone brood. This one This one here didn't get mated properly. So back into the mated queens, really good pattern on this one, so easy to tell. A couple of weeks ago we saw eggs in all of them and we thought this is good news. Fast forward a couple of weeks and you can easily see which ones are mated and which ones are the duds. So not much needs to be said about that one, they are definitely mated, beautiful brood pattern, completely full. This one needs an upgraded hive as soon as possible. So next one along, not quite as prolific, but still a good worker brood pattern. This one here I'll probably keep my eye on just because it's not a perfect pattern, but they're restricted for space in here, interspersed with pollen, and it's got a lot of nectar in there. So give it a couple of weeks and you can tell for sure on this one. And then the final colony, really beautiful brood pattern, and then we've got the queen on that frame as well. So okay, it wasn't 8 out of 8. It did look like 8 out of 8 at the time, But I was always going to do that follow-up video a couple of weeks after seeing eggs, just to get that confirmation that those eggs turned into worker brood. Here, 7 out of the 8, I'm confident they're well mated, and then we've got one that's failed, even though it looked like with the original laying of those eggs that it was very promising. Easy to be fooled by eggs. Never take eggs as a sign that your queen is mated. Wait for it to be capped over and assess both the type of brood and the pattern of brood that's being laid. Hope you enjoyed this series. I really like this queen rearing nuc. They don't pay me to say that. It's by far and away my favorite product that Hide Hives do. I might even get a couple more because it's such a versatile tool in terms of making up splits, making up nucs, and getting your queens mated.
