Buckfast Bees Vs THE Hereford Vikings

7?

No.

L?

Yeah.

Mine. What's that then? What does that mean? Laying.

Oh, laying.

Right, we're gonna do friendly versus angry this one, yeah? We're gonna talk about your old bees versus your new bees.

Yeah, yeah.

When I met Richard, he had a line of bees called the Hereford Vikings. Now that was a name that I gave them because if you came this close to his bees, they would batter you. And I used to talk to Richard and say, you should really try some of my bees. Like, they're a lot calmer, they're a lot more gentle. And I think you had reservations at the beginning, didn't you, in terms of taking on the Buckfast? In this video, we're going to talk about Buckfast bees versus the Hereford Vikings— what's good, what's bad, and everything in between. So tell me about your Hereford Vikings.

So my Hereford Vikings are basically 3 generations of Stephen's bees. So they took a mixture of Whatever my father, my grandfather could get hold of and hive, and as long as they produced honey, they didn't mind how many stings they took. And literally, it was in their hundreds per season. Now, since I have gone over to Buckfast Bees, beekeeping has become a lot more enjoyable. The acceptance of things you can do with the bees is a lot easier, i.e., putting in queens, taking splits, And it is just a pleasure to work with them.

This is so funny, yeah, because if I said to Richard, come on, we need to do a video saying how good Buckfast are, because it'd be good for the channel, it'd be good for the website, and Richard didn't believe that, he'd be like, absolutely not. Like, Richard, you can't tell Richard what to do. Richard does what Richard wants to do. But let's go back to the Hereford Vikings. So were they, did they produce much honey?

So the Hereford Vikings, as you want to call them, always produced honey every year, whether it was a good year or a bad year. My business model was sort of £30 of honey per hive on a sort of average year, sort of £20 on a bad year, and perhaps £40, £50 on a good year. The downside to them was the swarming, so you would never ever get that £100 of honey per hive because they would always look to swarm. And because of the strain of bee, they restricted their own brood nest because they always stored lots in the bottom, and at which point they swarm.

So your Herefordshire Vikings, as I like to call them, They weren't like a breed of bee, were they? They were just your mongrel stock from Herefordshire. Did you ever bring any queens in or anything? Or like, how did they start? Where did you get them from and where did you get them to?

Well, there were basically 3 generations of Stevenses managing bees, going back to my grandfather. And we're talking of the sort of time where they did everything with a horse and cart. It's going back a long way. And they've always given us a profitable income, which is really I know beekeeping's fine and everything else, but you need to— it needs to pay its way.

And tell me about like the stings from them, because I know firsthand the stings from the Herefordshire Vikings. But say you're going down there in like less than ideal conditions, you've got your bee suit on, like what would they do if we were there today? These were Herefordshire Vikings, a bit overcast today, and I opened this lid up, what would happen to me?

Well, by this time of year, it doesn't matter which Herefordshire Viking colony you went into, you would expect to get stung and you lose count of how many times you get stung. I mean, they are very good at protecting the hive. You don't have no wasp trouble, um, but the downside is it's, it's not very pleasant to, to, to receive 20, 50 stings a day. And it is the most often asked question when you say you're a beekeeper, how many times you get stung. Well, in Herefordshire with them bees, you lose count.

So could we stand there, like, if we're not even going into the colonies, could we stand here in front of them and they—

No, you wouldn't even be stood in the same apiary without your kit on.

Wow.

Even by the vehicle. They would follow you back to the vehicle and they'd see you out the gate. There is a massive difference.

So, you know me, I'm not trying to say that all of my bees are the friendliest. We know full well that I've had my fair share of very angry bees, but I've kind of been on this journey away from mongrel stock and introducing Buckfast in and using my own Buckfast breeder queens. And I probably started that journey a little bit before Richard. And I was coming down here and chatting to Richard and saying you really should like try the Buckfast Queens, they are very good, and you had like a lot of concerns, didn't you, in terms of the Buckfast Queens and the negatives around Buckfast Queens versus maybe the positives of the Herefordshire Vikings. So why did you, why did you not want to give up your Herefordshire Vikings? Like, what were you worried about?

I think my Herefordshire Vikings has always been true to me. They'd always give me a wage at the end of the day, so why would you give that up would be my sort of answer. They were always very frugal, so you didn't need much feeding. You could run them on a single brood and you'd always get your 2 supers of honey, but the downside was they weren't the pleasant bees to work. You literally, you were quite glad in the spring to take the tops off to have a look, but you were equally as glad in the autumn to put them to bed for winter.

And what about overwintering success? Were they pretty good at overwintering?

Yeah, no, they're a very good bee. I mean, obviously they've survived for that sort of long in that environment and pretty much Resistant to disease and just an all-round good bee. And obviously, like I said, they provided me with a living and that can't be said about some bees.

So this isn't a case of trying to knock Mongol stock and saying Buckfast is the best. It's just the comparison between the two. And as you can see from Richard there, there's loads of positives, isn't there, for Mongol stock? You can manage them on a single brood. They give you a consistent crop year on year. But I think for Richard and for me, the big negative from them is that the temperament can be very iffy. And if you just want a kind of couple of beehives in your garden, that's definitely not what you want. So I kind of poked and prodded and said, come on, let's do some Buckfast queens. And eventually you decided to take a little batch, didn't you, and have some queens. And I think you've been running them now for 2 or 3 years, both in this apiary with breeder queens and some down in Hereford. And are you a total convert? Like, what do you like now about the Buckfast colonies that you run? Be honest.

I like the fact that it's just the way that you can take splits, and they're very adaptable to doing different things. The fact is you can always get enough bees to take your splits just by feeding. And I think, and I think the temperament is number one really. I mean, I have to work bees every single day, so you can imagine every single day is not bright sunshine and beautiful weather, and I sometimes am putting a raincoat over the top of my bee suit because I know if I don't do it on that day, I've missed that opportunity. So actually, yes, I do prefer them. I mean, I do. I would never get rid of my Hereford stock, much to Lawrence laughing in the background here, because of, I think, the genetic pull that's been in Hereford so long. And there is a sort of relatively new, but I don't know whether it's that new, Chronic Bee on the scene, which does seem to— they seem to be able to manage, whereas certain lines of Buckfast bees are Definitely, it can just wipe the hives out, which is my only reservation. If it wasn't for that point, I think I would be a total convert.

It's an interesting observation. I won't cut that bit out to kind of promote the Buckfast bees. You have seen that where the Buckfast bee maybe isn't able to protect itself as well from CBPV. Are there any other downsides to keeping Buckfast bees that you see?

The only one other downside would be you need to check for stores. All the time. Just because of the way that our land is managed now, there isn't a flow all the time, and they don't seem to reduce their, their, their patterns quick enough. They do reduce a pattern, but they don't seem to do it quick enough to the way that agricultural farms are land, whereas the black bee probably does that better, but then he doesn't build up as big. On the plus side, with a Buckfast bee, if you can build a colony up to 2 brood boxes full of bees, and you've got 5 supers on the top, within 5 or 6 days you can have 5 or 6 supers of honey. Wow. You're never ever going to do that with a Herefordshire bee. Whether you're caught in the middle or where you want to be, I don't know.

And just on that stack of honey thing, do you think that's just due to the number of bees that you can get?

Oh, of course it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, it'd be kilos per day that they can gather because instead of talking 50,000, you could be 100,000 bees.

Yeah.

You know, and there is no doubt that a Buckfast queen is capable of covering 2 brood boxes. If you're running 11 frames, she's capable of laying 22 frames of solid brood, whereas you would never get that with a Herefordshire bee.

So there we go, a little bit of a comparison between Richard's Herefordshire Vikings and some Buckfast colonies. I'm not going to say that there's a clear winner there. There's just 2 different varieties of bee. Some are good at some things, others are good at other things. If you want nice, calm, placid bees though, I would always recommend going for a Buckfast. If you just want to keep bees kind of in the middle of nowhere and you're not too fussed about honey and you want a low intervention bee, maybe you can go for some local Mongol stock or some of Richard's Herefordshire Vikings. Of course, I can't leave this video without a plug at the end. These bees here, these are for sale this year. Overwintered Welsh-mated Buckfast queens, perfectly calm. You can see we've stood here and spoken for like 12-15 minutes without a Single bee coming anywhere near us. These are available on blackmountainhoney.co.uk. You getting into it, Richard? He's loving it.