Did My New Queen Survive? Accepted or Rejected After 14 Days?

2 weeks ago I introduced a queen into this colony. Let's get inside, see if she's been accepted. So it was only 2 weeks ago where I had a huge double brood colony. I took out a 6-frame nuc, I gave that to a friend, I compressed it down to a single brood box, I added my supers on, waited 8 days, came back, knocked down all the emergency cells, and added in my mated queen, Black Mountain Honey F1 Buckfast. I immediately popped the tabs as well, having rendered the colony hopelessly queenless. And I've not been back in for 2 weeks. That is what I'm going to do right now. So really big strong colony, few little puffs of smoke there, smoker's still getting going. So it'd be interesting to see if the bees have actually moved up into the super. I suspect that there's probably not much going on up there, it's more of a buffer for me this time of the year. I want to get downstairs into the brood box. And there we go, as suspected the bees have not touched the supers up here at all. But this is fine, this is normal for a very cold April. It's North Wales, and you can see down here we've got a very, very happy, healthy colony of bees. So look underneath the queen excluder, doesn't look to be in there. I always like to have a little bit of a bet, Zane, and see whether the queen's been accepted. And you can tell, I would say like 95% of the time, you can tell whether the queen's been accepted or not, especially coming back in after a couple of weeks here. I'm going to say this is a banker, and I promise you I won't change the video at all. But see how they're in a really nice cluster? See how they're not flying up everywhere? See how they feel? If I said to you, don't they look really well coordinated, would you agree? Yeah. Yeah, and that's what happens when you get a queen that's accepted. Everyone knows their job. So when I'm going in and looking to see whether a queen's been accepted, I'm not necessarily going in and pulling out all the frames and thinking I must see the queen. All I'm doing is I'm looking for eggs. I think if I see eggs, the job is good. But then there's a follow-on step after seeing eggs, is to make sure that the eggs are transitioning through to the correct worker brood. Hopefully we'll be able to see all different stages in here because we've left it a couple of weeks. But don't go hunting for the queen. Eggs and brood is all you really need to see. I'm struggling to see through the veil a little bit, so I am going to take my veil off because these are clearly pretty chilled out bees. Let's give them a touch of smoke. Another tip as well: when you're searching for queens, you can do without the smoke like that. You saw really small amount there. When you start puffing down like that, the queens will run off, and if you're searching for queens, that's kind of the last thing that you want. So I can see from the first frame why the bees have not gone up into the super. This end frame here is very, very light, although there's a little bit of nectar coming in now, but they've just not reached the point where they're just going to start naturally rising up. That will take place over the next few weeks. Ah, see, this is a nice frame. You've got a nice frame of stores there. Still got plenty of capped stores. Look at that. So you can see the difference here, Zane. This will be like the overwintered capped stores, maybe a little bit granulated. And then up here, see all of this stuff? This is open nectar. This is stuff that's just coming in. Show you some of that there. See how it's crystallised underneath? Oh yeah. So the bees will work that. It's no problem. If you've got anything like this and you want the bees to work it, what you need to do is bruise it, which is kind of do what I'm doing there, and then put it into the middle of the brood box, and then the bees will move it round. See this, Zane? See these little vibration things the bees are doing? This one here, watch. Oh yeah. Yeah, do you know what that is? I couldn't tell you. Right, that is the waggle dance. Yeah, and what that bee there is indicating to all of her sisters is, we found some nectar over there, this is the direction it's in, and this is roughly how far it is. And it's that— it's the angle in which they do that. Some guy worked it out and it's really, really accurate. Isn't it amazing? And then— and so— and it's crazy, you can see it. Yeah, if you put like, um, if you put some sugar syrup out and then the bees start robbing it, yeah, you can see how effective that communication is because within 2 minutes there's like double the amount of bees, and then within 5 minutes there's just these thousands of bees. And you think, where have they come from? How do they know it's there? And it's because they're going back and telling their mates. Very clever. It's cool, isn't it? Okay, so looking in, still not seeing the queen, but I have seen eggs. So this is a really good opportunity. So this will be a successful introduction. But if you come right in here, Zayn. So this is the first sign, and this is the thing that I'm really looking for. I wanna see eggs. If I was doing my inspections, I'd just close this back up and say all is good. But if you're seeing eggs like that, you wanna be able to see the next stage as well, which is that progression into larva. But then you can't tell whether it's a drone or a worker bee until that cell is completely capped over. They kind of cap it over in a different style and a different size. So what we're looking for is worker brood, and hopefully if I pull out a frame now, I'll be able to find you some to show you. If you want super calm Buckfast bees like this, check them out over on our website, blackmountainhoney.co.uk. So we will continue. Ideally, I'd like to show you the queen, but I definitely want to show you some of this brood as well. So I have to say, I've just taken this frame out and I have put it back in again because it was going to be a disaster. And the reason why it was going to be a disaster, if you zoom right in here, Zane, If you have a look up here, all of this brood that is being produced, this is not worker brood. All of this brood around here is drone brood. Worker brood looks flat like this, whereas drone brood is very bulbous, looks a little bit disgusting. So I looked at the brood on this frame and thought, oh my goodness, it's a drone-laying queen. And just as I say her name there, I just spotted the queen as well. She is there. Beautiful F1 Buckfast queen from Black Mountain Honey accepted into this colony. But is she laying drone brood only? It doesn't look good, does it? Look at all that drone brood there. So on the very rare occasions that we send a queen and it does turn out to be a drone layer, we will offer a free replacement. Absolutely no quibble whatsoever. But don't judge it on the first frame because this is the back end of April. This is early May. This is natural swarm season, and this is when you're likely to find huge amounts of drone brood in all of your colonies. So let's get in here and see if we can actually find some capped worker brood and see if that introduction was a success. And here we go, first frame. Thank goodness for that. And I have to say, that would've been highly embarrassing, but we've got brood in all stages. We've got tons of capped brood here. We've got a few bees flying up and checking me out, but nothing too bad. What I'm going to do here, Zane, is I am going to shake all of these bees off for you so you can have a look at that brood. I think before I do that, I'm going to do my veil up. So there we go, we can see good brood pattern forming, brood in all stages there. I'm just going to have a quick look, see if I can find another frame with some slightly advanced brood to see if we can assess that pattern. And here we go, this one looks good. Queen cage here completely empty. Just remove that now. Nothing in it. It's one of our premium F1 Buckfast queens. So I'll shake off this frame as well, but you kind of don't really even need me to shake it off to be able to assess that brood pattern, which is pretty good. And there we go. That's what we're looking for. We want to see a nice tight brood pattern like that, really compressed together. Cascading out from capped brood through to larva through to eggs, this is a textbook introduction. So this colony here is all set up and ready to go. Queen excluder is going to go back on. The queen is settled in. I've got brood in all stages, plenty of space, plenty of nectar coming in. The supers are already there. I'm just going to put it all back together again and let the bees get on with it. If you want to learn at home how to get the very best out of your bees, check out our 14-day beekeeper course, which will turn you from a beginner to competent beekeeper, just 14 days.