Buckfast Queen from Germany – Understanding the Lutz Eggert Line

In this video, I'm going to give you a snapshot on an update of my pure Lutz German breeder queen. And I have to apologize, I keep on getting it wrong and I keep on getting told off by people who know loads more than me about this kind of thing. I have to stop calling it an F0 breeder queen because there's kind of no such thing as F0. I need to start calling it a pure queen. That is what this queen is in here. It's bred by Lutz Eggert in Germany, and this is a pure queen because the drones have been controlled. The The offspring from this pure queen will be an F1, and then so on and so on down to F2, F3, F4. I always thought the one back you could call it F0, but people who know way better than me have told me, no, you've got to stop using F0. That's not technically correct. You need to call it a pure queen. So there we go. F0 breeder queens no more, and I'm not even allowed to call them breeder queens. This is a pure queen that I'm going to take some F1 daughters from. I am really, really impressed with how this colony is getting on. So I need to give you a little bit of a backstory. My other pure queen died, really annoying. So I've got my backup pure queens in. Really happy that I bought those additional queens because it gives me the ability to move from queen to queen to make sure I've got some good stock to take some grafts from. But also there's a further backstory with this nuc. So I've transported this one up here along with all of the other nucs for sale, and I brought it up here because I've got 2 pure Danish Buckfast queens behind you there. And I'm actually going to do my grafting in this apiary, and then I'm going to take the queens off to another apiary where I'm going to flood it with drones, and I'm going to do my mating in that apiary. But this queen here, unbelievable performance so far. I overwintered it in a 6-frame nuc, and when I went to go and check on my other pure queen and realized that she died, this one had no room whatsoever. So I decided to give it some more space. I put on an additional 6 frames because I was worried about it swarming. Now at this point, I wasn't sure that my other pure queen was dead, And this one here is a 2021 queen. So I'm going to run this colony here as like a production colony this year, just to test it, just to make sure it's good before I start making many, many grafts from it. I will run some grafts from it this year, but I'm not looking to limit the size of this colony because I want to test that queen at least for 1 year, maybe for 2 years, before I deem it to be a decent enough queen to breed from. So this queen in here was on 6 frames going over winter. I put another 6 frames on top of it. I came back 1 week later and they had doubled in size. So instead of being over just 6 frames with brood in all stages, they'd gone up to 12 frames and it was brood in all stages across 11 or 12 of them. So I put another extension box on top. So 6 over 6 over 6. I came back a week later and she had done exactly the same thing and I counted 16 frames of brood. We're not even to the middle of April yet. And this colony here, this purebred German Buckfast queen, was over 16 frames of national brood. So I'm really happy with the performance so far. I brought her up here though, just 'cause I want to keep all of those pure queens together, just to make it easy for me to take any grafts from it. I'm going to show you though, in this colony today, just how good they're looking, how nice and gentle they are, and just to give you another little close-up of that pure queen. So let's get inside, check the bees out, see how they're getting on. So as you can see, we've got a mixture here of some of the new frames that I've put in that have been completely drawn out, filled with brood. And then some of the ones that they actually overwintered on as well. Amazing to see the differences in color just from the ones that are, say, 12 months old to the ones that are completely new. And what's really nice about this colony, same as my other pure queen, is they are so, so gentle, so calm. I'm not doing this one without a veil because I've got so many nucs up here today and it is a mega flying day, so they're just getting stuck in my hair and stinging me. But this one here, couldn't ask for nice calmer bees. I'll pull out a couple of frames now, show you what that brood pattern's looking like. Show you the queen, and then we'll close them back up and let them get on with it. One thing I need to do with this colony now that I've moved it is I need to give them a little feed. Just going to give them a little trickle in that feeder there because they are running a little bit low on stores. And then within a few days, once they've taken those stores down, I'm going to upgrade them into a full-size colony, and then we'll let them have the 2022 season to see what they can do. So you can just see when you're lifting out the frames there, the bees don't want to fly up at you. Really nice, calm, gentle bees. This is one of the old frames there. I'll do a couple of close-ups. Always keen to find the queen before I start messing around. I want to isolate that queen. Definitely, definitely don't want to damage another pure queen. So there she is, really, really good-looking queen. You can see the bees are very, very calm on the comb, very attentive of that queen there. Just going to put her off to one side, but this is a new frame that has been completely drawn out, filled, and they've capped over some stores in a matter of about a week. And that's the queen. So she is a very, very nice looking 2021 pure mated queen. Hopefully going into '22 and '23, she will be the mother of lots of F1 daughters. So another trait that I really like about this Buckfast queen and her offspring is that they are gathering a huge amount of pollen. Always like to see that because it means that you've got the ability to have real expansive growth They're not going to go out and get lots of pollen, and you're not going to get the protein to rear all of that brood. She has already proven that they want to have a very, very big brood nest. 16 frames of brood in a triple nuc around the 10th of April is bonkers, and they've done that by going out and foraging lots and lots of early pollen. So you can see it in there, that is pretty much a whole frame of pollen. Going to be very nice as well for pinching these frames when it comes to doing some queen rearing. This one here, really good example of a nice frame that you can use for rearing queens. And then the final frame that I'm going to show you here, this is a frame that was put into this colony a couple of weeks ago now. Completely drawn out, completely capped over, really nice brood pattern. You can see how pure the bees are here. There's not ones that are very light and some that are very dark. Very, very small amount of variation in them. So I wouldn't give them a perfect score in terms of their homogeneous nature. I was speaking to a queen breeder the other day and he was saying that they use a 4-point system with 4 being the absolute best, and this is one of the things that they look for is how pure the offspring are. And I would say in here you're maybe at a 4, but if not, you're down at a 3, seeing a tiny little bit of variation between the bees in terms of their color. But pretty good, I'm happy with them. Nice brood pattern, nice gentle colony. Queen's looking really good. I'm very happy with this pure, not F0 breeder queen. So there we go. Wanted to do that video for a while. Couple of reasons. Just to give you an update on that colony. Also to correct a couple of my mistakes. I'll always put my hands up if someone knows better than me and tells me I'm doing something wrong. I'll say fair play and I'll admit it on the videos. So I do have to stop saying F0 breeder queen. I'm going to now refer to them as pure queens. If you weren't aware that our other pure queen didn't make it through the winter, and you wanna check out what happened to that colony, there is also an amazing sting to the face in this video as well. Check out this video here showing what happened to my other pure queen.