Laurence Edwards requeened an aggressive colony with a carefully selected F0 breeder queen. After one winter, the bees became so calm he handles them bare-handed. He explains why gentle temperament matters more than honey yield for backyard beekeepers and shows two ways to breed calmer bees: develop your own genetics over years, or buy premium queens and use grafting and artificial insemination.
This is what happens when you don't accept mediocrity and you're constantly seeking to iteratively improve your bees. So this colony of bees here last year was requeened with an F0 breeder queen. They were horrible, they were angry, they stung me in the face. I'm going to go in here today without a bee suit on, with no foul, with no gloves, and we are going to take a look at what these bees have turned into over the winter. Given them enough time now to make sure that there's no horrible genetics left over, All that we're going to have in here is the offspring of that artificially inseminated queen that has been specifically bred to be as gentle as it can possibly be. So let's get inside, take a look, see if I get stung, see how friendly and calm these bees are. So you can immediately see when you open that lid just how calm these bees are. None of them flying up, they're genuinely not fussed. It's a flying day, it's about 14 degrees here, you can hear the buzz all around the apiary. These are really nice, calm honeybees. So you can still see a couple of bees there flying around my face, but if I put my hands over the colony like this, you'll see they're really not that interested. You'll get a few flyers. They've not really even had the lid off. They've not seen proper daylight, the majority of these bees. So they're naturally inquisitive, but they're super, super gentle. As I said, I'll show that on the other camera there. Like, I'm basically touching the bees there. And they are not fussed by me at all. So I'm not going to go wild with this colony of bees here. I'm not going to pull it apart. I'm around here today doing my heft checks, but it's 14 degrees Celsius today. The bees are flying okay. There's no benefit to me going into the colony today, but I'm experienced enough to be able to take a frame out like that without damaging any of the bees. And I just wanted to show you just how calm they are. Like, they don't come much calmer than that. I can put them up kind of close to my face like this. I know, I know, I'm tempting fate, but they're super, super calm. And they're only super calm because I made a decision to not accept mediocre bees. I didn't accept the aggressiveness. And I'm not preaching to say that I know best or I'm right, because I went for years with accepting angry bees. And I've just had enough of it because even if the bees produce tons and tons of honey, what's the point in beekeeping if they're going to be horrible and they're going to sting you? Now this doesn't necessarily apply to bee farmers, this doesn't apply to people who are dealing with thousands of colonies of bees. It doesn't really matter if they're gentle, if they're not going to give you a bumper honey crop, you're not going to be in it for the bees' temperament. But in terms of people who have got a couple of colonies in their garden, I would argue that the temperament is considerably more important than the actual honey crop. I would definitely say for me, if I've got bees in my garden, I would sacrifice a 50, 60, 70% reduction in honey crop for nice calm friendly bees. So then to get bees like this, you've got 2 choices really. One is that you, you develop a gene pool yourself and you select from the very best. That's going to take you a long time to do that. Selecting from the very best like that does take time, and it's not to say that it's never going to work, but you're kind of limited by what you've you've got. If you've got 10 colonies of pretty rubbish bees, you can select them until you're blue in the face, but you're not going to get the best, calmest bees that you can get because you've just not got the genetics. So then the other option is to buy in some really good genetics. I'm not going to plug my bees again here saying buy them from me because they're the best, although they are pretty good, but just get them from someone else. And even if that means buying them in at F1, that's going to help improve it in the short term, But buying them in at F0 and then grafting your own queens and keeping a good selection of artificially inseminated queens from different breeders, from different genetics, means that you can get to a point where they're like this. I'll flash back a few of my videos from last year. My bees have not always been this calm. It's cost me a lot of money to buy these queens in, and I will continue to use them and breed from them, and I will continue to make sure that I'm not I've got aggressive bees. Not happy with aggressive bees. I don't want to sell people aggressive bees. I want nice, calm, gentle bees, and I want to make sure that I'm doing everything I possibly can year on year to make those bees as gentle as they possibly can be. I'm going to put these bees back now. I hope you enjoyed this video. If you did, please hit the thumbs up button. Please subscribe to the channel so you can see how my bees are getting on through the 2023 beekeeping season.
