Laurence Edwards and beekeeper Richard discuss late-season queen rearing at his apiary. A virgin queen hatched August 24 should start laying in ten days. The cutoff for grafting is around late August, but drones and weather are critical, and mating nucs need three frames packed with bees to survive robbing.
Right, I'm in Richard's apiary again, and I've persuaded Richard to open up some colonies without his bee suit. We were filming a video here before showing a colony being attacked by wasps, and we've opened it up because Richard thought there might be a virgin queen in there. In this video, we're gonna talk about how late in the year you should be trying to raise queens and when you really do need to call it quits. So what have we got here, Richard?
We do have a virgin queen, hatched the 24th of August. We've had some quite good weather the last few days, so I'm hoping she's been out and mated, but the signs are good. She's just in here hiding. She's looking as though the bees are attending to her, so I'm assuming she will come in to lay within the next perhaps 10 days.
So how late do you take it into the year in terms of grafting and raising queens? Do you go all the way through to September, October, or is there a cutoff for you?
I think it's very much weather dependent, but I have never had an issue with matings. I mean, I do go to great lengths to make sure there's sufficient drones and to to keep sufficient drones in an apiary later on into the year becomes very, very difficult. The risk of robbing is probably the worst thing for mating nucs. So I wouldn't take anything under a 3-frame Beers Honeybee ram-packed full of bees to put with a virgin queen, because you know the stronger hives within that apiary will rob that out.
I think that's a really important point to make. And you can see the robbing kind of continuing and getting worse. So we're going to speed this video up a little bit. But using like little mini mating nucs is fine in May and June, isn't it? When there's no wasps around. We're trying to do that late in the year. The wasps would just take them out. So what, you use 3 national frames in a BS Honeybees nuc? And do you think they're going to be able to cope with this wasp pressure? It's quite extreme.
Yeah, I'm probably going to shut this entrance for a day to give these bees a chance to just work things out and then reopen. And sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't. At that point, it's probably a move to another apiary would be the only thing that would sort this out.
And what are your thoughts on trapping wasps? Like, are you one for trapping them, putting traps up in the apiary?
I don't do anything in terms of trapping wasps. I don't kill wasp nests. I just think that we just deal with the problem but not in an invasive way. I mean, wasps do a lot, a lot of good. If you, if you look at aphids on plants and stuff like that. So I just think we work with what we got really.
So if you had to give like a firm cutoff date for doing your last grafts of the year, assuming you're just in kind of like an average year, when would you say would be the last grafts that you run each year? I would definitely say sort of end of August is And do you see the success taper off throughout the year? Do you find you get more queens earlier or better queens earlier?
No, I definitely get better matings late in the season. It seems to be over the last few years that the weather seems to settle down at that time of year. But I think as well, probably the drone count is very, very high within this apiary.
And I think that's probably a good shout. This apiary here is absolutely beautiful, stuffed full of top quality genetics with lots of drone comb in there as well. So it's flooding the apiary. And then obviously this weather helps as well, which is quite ironic considering it's about to Pour down with rain here. It's been really, really nice weather this week, absolutely beautiful. So what line is this virgin from here?
This is a— you asked a good question there actually, because I, um, it's from Simmons's.
Okay, Duncan's line.
Yeah, Duncan's line.
So we've got loads of breeder queens and Richard tries all different ones out. I'm going to be doing lots more videos with Richard both this year and definitely into next year as well. And what we're going to do, a video that I'm really excited about, is doing some tests on some of the breeder queens' offspring. We're going to do various lines at F1 down from the F0 breeder queens, and then we're going to assess them, and we're going to run that on our YouTube channel.
So this is, I would say, still a virgin queen because they're not mature for at least 10 days after hatching. So she hopefully will go out and fly within the next couple of days, which the weather is looking very, very good.
