In this video, the presenter from Black Mountain Honey takes viewers inside a German Buckfast breeder queen colony to showcase its unusually calm temperament. He explains that the colony’s calmness results from controlled breeding using artificially inseminated queens with known maternal and paternal lines, allowing selection of gentle traits. The walkthrough includes observations of clean bees with little propolis, extensive drone brood frames that signal a colony nearing swarming, and the identification of the marked breeder queen. The speaker discusses a long‑term collaboration with breeder Lutz, highlighting access to exclusive Buckfast lines and iterative improvement. He outlines plans to graft offspring from the pure Buckfast queen throughout the 2026 season, emphasizing the need to maximize grafts from such calm bees. The video concludes with a brief promotion of the channel’s 14‑Day Beekeeper online course for beginners.
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Today I'm going to show you inside one of my German Buckfast breeder queen colonies. So most of the time when people open up beehives like this, they're greeted to a big cloud of bees coming out and saying hello, but not these bees here. They have been specifically bred to be super, super calm, to just not respond to humans in any way whatsoever. And you can see, look, the bees are just completely content with going on and doing what they want to do. You can come in and kind of knock and quite aggressively knock. You know, I'm not messing around here, and I apologize, I shouldn't have done that, but it was to prove the point that not all bees are angry and it is possible to breed bees that are super, super calm. Now, it's not a perfect science, and you will get scales of temperament, and some are calmer than others, but this one here is an artificially inseminated breeder queen. It comes with a known maternal heritage but also a known paternal heritage because of the way that the queen is artificially inseminated. They extract the drone semen from the best colonies, the colonies that are like this, and then inseminate the virgin queens to control both of those really important sides. And it results in bees that are this calm. So I'll pull out some frames, I'll show you what it's all about, I'll show you some of the brood, I'll introduce you to the queen, and I will let you know how you can get your hands on some of the offspring from this beautiful breed. So let's jump in. One of the first things that I notice on here is just how clean these bees are. No propolis whatsoever. Some people like propolis, and our Caucasian bees produce crazy, crazy amounts of propolis, which is good if you want to trap it. But it's just an interesting observation with these Buckfast bees. They literally produce no propolis whatsoever. So I'm going to get my gloves on. We will take a look inside this colony. So that's not the best frame to pull out first. And when I looked at that and peered down, I thought, oh, come on. Don't be a drone laying queen. But that is a full frame of drones, and it is like 21st, 22nd of April here today. This colony is filling both of these boxes. And not only have I got a frame full of drones here, if I go down to the next frame as well, another frame completely full of drones. So 2 full frames of drone brood, 20th of April in the UK this year. Now I'm obviously looking at that and thinking I don't like the look of that. I don't like to see that much drone brood, but drones laid up like that, full frames of drones laid in a pattern like that, doesn't indicate anything bad to me. All it indicates is that this colony is not that far off swarming. I was always pretty confident that I was going to get to frames like this as well, which is beautiful capped worker brood. So there is nothing wrong with this queen. She's definitely not a drone layer, and these really are some of the calmest bees I've ever seen. So I had a lot of questions about the Lutz queens, people saying, how come you're stocking the Lutz queens now? Can you tell us a bit more about them? And I've known Lutz for a good few years. I've been using his queens back for 3 or 4 years now, and I've always been impressed with just how calm they are. But I've kind of been even more impressed with Lutz as a person. I really like Lutz, got a lot of time for him. He is the most well-connected person I think I've ever met in the beekeeping arena, but he's also just a really nice guy as well. And he's always got loads of cool different projects, and he's receptive to feedback. He's happy to work on these bees, to work on specific lines, kind of at our instruction or in collaboration with him to get better than this, to build on already years and years of Buckfast breeding experience. Now we don't do any breeding at Black Mountain Honey. We do tons of queen rearing. We rear a lot of queens and we give feedback to breeders who make the selection on our behalf. And then we get sent fantastic breeder queens like this, which are obviously a joy to handle. But the collaboration with Lutz is going to go a bit further than that. It's going to be continuous, it's going to be iterative, it's definitely going to be collaborative, and we're going to get access to lines that are not available on the open market. That is something that's super exciting going forward, but the collaboration between me and Lutz will be a long-term one, and there is lots, lots more to come. So I was just about to say, so no sign of the queen, so we should probably pack it back up, and I just found her. Her little blue spot gave her away on this next frame. Let's see if we can get her out and show you. Feels like it's stuck on something there. No, it's a very heavy frame. Is that all stores on that side? Okay, there we go. I was gonna say it felt like it was stuck on something. Right, that is rogue comb going all over the place, and that is not the frame that you really want your queen on there. But there she is, our beautiful, pure— not an F1, but a pure Buckfast queen. Some like to call it an F0, but it means that both those sides are completely controlled And this one here is an artificially inseminated queen. And we're gonna run some grafts off this one this year, but we ran loads of grafts off it last year and the offspring have come through winter so, so well. So this will definitely be used throughout the 2026 season. And you know, with bees as calm as this, you've gotta get as many grafts as you can get. So there we go, a very special queen, a special colony, and a new collaboration for Black Mountain Honey, one that I'm super excited about. If you wanna learn more about your bees, check out our online course, 14-Day Beekeeper, which will turn you from a beginner competent beekeeper in just 2 weeks.
