How To Raise Mated Queen Bees: A Step By Step Guide

In this video, I'm going to show you how all of our UK overwintered mated queens are reared, raised, and mated using the Richard Stephens method, which is heavily inspired by Bob Binney. So let's jump straight into it and I'll show you the setup. Richard starts off with a double brood configuration. We've got a floor at the bottom, a single brood box, another single brood box. This here is a feeder, polyash forth feeder, and a roof. Inside this double brood configuration here, we have a huge box full of bees. There's brood, brood in all stages, lots of young nurse bees, a really big, strong, prolific colony that is filling those 2 boxes. The method that Richard uses, which is inspired by Bob Binney, is to compress that brood box down, take all of the resources from both of these boxes, get it downstairs into this box, but the queen will remain upstairs and there'll be a 2-inch air gap, which means that the pheromone from up there doesn't go downstairs and it creates a queenless state. Add that into the compression, the swarming impulse, it is 2 impulses working together, the swarming impulse and the emergency impulse. So the only thing that you need over and above that double brood configuration is a board like this, and it is a super simple board that you can make at home. It has a piece of mesh in the middle there, but But it also has another piece of mesh in the middle there. So if you look at that from a front view, you get this 2-inch strip all the way along that is air. The bees can't get down and the bees can't get up. It's very, very important that you've got that space because otherwise you will not get any queen cells using this method. It also has an entrance there that is used to bleed all of the bees down and leave just enough bees to be able to cater for that queen upstairs. So Richard's showing us the method there. First thing he does, he takes off the roof, opens it up, and as you can see, we've got a really nice, big, strong, very calm colony inside. Now, all of the frames in that top box there are gonna be full of brood. You'll be opening them up and there'll be big, nice capped frames of brood. There might be a little bit of honey in there. We're doing this early July at the moment. Richard goes ahead and takes that first box off, splitting the hive into 2. The first thing that Richard needs to do, he is totally up against it here. He needs to go and find the queen. In order to produce this queenless state, you need to identify where that queen and locate her correctly in this hive to ensure that that pheromone cannot travel down. There's a lot of work and a lot of effort goes into Setting up these starter hives, but unless you can find the queen, you cannot continue. So I'm going to jump into the other box there. I'm going to have a race with Richard. Let's see who can find this queen first. Instantly after I said it, Richard found the queen. Brilliant. So the queen is on that frame over there. So once you've found your queen and you've placed her off onto one side, you need to go through the colony and find these resources. You need at least 2 frames of capped brood, as much capped brood on the frame as possible. You also need a frame of pollen, your best pollen frame with as many different colors as you can get. And then the final thing that you need is a frame feeder, because once we get this set up, we will need to feed it with 1:1 sugar syrup. The final thing that Richard looks for there is a frame that has eggs that have literally just hatched out into larva. You'll see the tiniest C-shaped larva flooded with raw jelly, and you place that into a slot where we're going to place the grafts. So this is a really good example of a pollen frame. So not a huge amount of different colors on there, but still a good amount. But what we've got on this frame definitely is a lot of pollen, and pollen equals protein, and you do not get good queens, you do not get copious amounts of royal jelly without good amounts of protein. This one, very important, find your very best pollen frame throughout the apiary. So you take all of your resources out and you place it just outside of the hive, and then the remainder of the frames, you're going to have brood here. You're going to place all of the best brood frames over this side and all of the best honey frames over here. This section here though really doesn't matter. What we do next is the important bit. So in slot 1, we place a frame feeder. In slot 2 here, we're going to place our pollen frame with the best pollen facing inwards. In slot 3 here, we're going to add our frame of larva, the ones that have just opened from eggs that are flooded with royal jelly. And then the final frame that goes in there is a frame of capped brood, and that is the frame that we've got our queen on there. So to recap, we put our frame feeder in number 1, our pollen frame in number 2, our frame of larva in slot 3, 3, and then this one here, we place our capped frame of brood back in, but you do not place the queen there. The queen needs to go somewhere else. So this is how the system works now. We've set that box up into the configuration that we need for 24 hours' time. The beauty of this system here is it's a very, very quick way to set up a starter finisher in order to be able to create queens very, very quickly. So once your bottom box is set up like that, you put that final frame of brood back in, taking the queen off somewhere else, pop her in a cage for now, probably the easiest way of doing it. So then the next job is to go through the other box where we don't think there a queen and shake all of the bees in. Now, Richard's system doesn't use a shaker box, but you could use a shaker box here if you want. So you could just put another queen excluder over the top, another box on top, and shake them through and filter out any unknown queens. I think that's a good thing to do. Richard knows what he's doing and gets incredibly high success rates, so I'm definitely not going to question it. But the idea here is you shake off the majority of the bees. You don't need to take off every single one. You need to leave a few up there for the queen. Because when we put this board on, you're going to see the entrances change around and we're going to end up leaving the queen in the upstairs chamber with very few bees up there. More than enough to keep her company while we do our grafting and while we raise some queens. But what we're doing here is we are compressing down a double beehive number of bees into a single box. We're adding in protein, we're adding in carbohydrate in the form of sugar syrup and pollen, and we are turbocharging this colony here. So perfect timing to show you this board. The entrance needs to be on the other side. So the normal beehive entrance is facing that way. The entrance on this The board is facing that way. So what's going to happen? Bees are going to come out of this top box. Any bees that are remaining there, they're going to come out. They don't know where they're going. They're just going to go back into this entrance. We're bleeding the majority of the bees from the top box into the bottom box and leaving this cushioned air gap. A really important design feature here. This is the top of the brood box here. This is a void where the bees can cluster up. We need to give the bees that space. If we don't give the bees that There is a risk of them overheating. So that void there is for the bees to cluster. We've got one piece of mesh along there, another piece of mesh along there. This 2-inch gap here is air. No bees can go up, no bees can go down. The queen is up here. This is where her pheromone is. This 2-inch air gap here gives you enough distance in order for the bottom box to think they're queenless and start to raise queen cells. So the way that Richard likes to do it is he will shake out 6 frames into that bottom box, and then he just leaves 4 frames there with all of the bees on. And places every single frame back in that top box. It's a really nice configuration, this, because you're not adding anything in, you're not taking anything away, you're just shaking the bees where you want them to go and then setting up 2 entrances to make sure that all of the bees are where you need them to be. The 2-inch air gap there gives you your queenless state, and then 24 hours later, this colony here is perfectly set up and ready for grafting. We're going to close this one up, we're going to fast forward 24 hours. We've got one over there that is set up exactly as it should be for 24 hours later. Let's go over and see how they're getting on. So once you've got your starter finisher set up like that, you leave it for 24 hours. And you might think, well, where are you now? That's not the starter finisher. This is the breeder queen. The next thing you need to do is go and select a frame of the correct age larva from the very best colony that you've got. This here is a wonderful German F0 pure Buckfast breeder queen, and it is perfectly primed for grafting because there's been a really nice flow on. There's larva of the correct age, and there's lots and lots of royal jelly already in the cell. So I'm going to take a frame of this. Richard's going to go through and take it out. I'll give you a really good close-up of the frame and I'll talk to you about the size of the larva that you should be grafting. Now the idea with these larva is that you get them the second they hatch out, literally milliseconds afterwards. Now the reason that you want to get them so small and so young is that that gives them more time for you to be able to force-feed them royal jelly. The more jelly you feed them, the bigger and more vibrant they're going to be. Now obviously as soon as they hatch out they are Tiny. You literally couldn't see them at all. So when they get to a point where you can see them, you're going to go in and start grafting them out. But I'm going to show you on this frame here the difference in size, some that are good, some that are not so good, and I'm going to show you just how small the right ones are. And hopefully you get some royal jelly in there as well. So Richard's just using a little bit of grass there to get all of the bees off. Doesn't like to shake his grafting frames like that because it can damage the larva. Very, very good way of doing it. I'm not a fan of bee brushes, but Looking at the bees there with the grafts, really good technique. Very important, do not shake your grafting frame. So this is the grafting frame that Richard's chosen from the Breeder Queen colony. I'll show you it on a couple of different cameras now, just so you can see exactly what we're looking for. So first up, wide angle shot for you there. Doesn't look like a grafting frame, does it? It looks like a frame of eggs, kind of from that shot there. But look, no capped brood whatsoever. You want to get those eggs just as they are hatching out. This is the one that I want to show you here. This is the close-up to show you what those larvae should look exactly like. So I've got that nice and close there. You can see right in the middle of the screen there's a patch of larva there. They are huge. Don't go anywhere near them. They are not going to produce good queens. And if we look there, center of the frame, just below the nectar, you should see eggs. You can't graft eggs. They need to be larva. Around there, these are the correct size larva. But as I said, what you're looking for is you are looking for the larva that have just hatched out, the tiniest larva you can see. So there's the breeder queen, Green marked German Buckfast breeder queen. Really super, super calm, this one. If you're looking for the calmest bees in the UK, head over to blackmountainhoney.co.uk. We have got you covered. So the next step is taking the frame into the car, putting it on this really nifty stand. Apis Engineering gave me this back in 2024, and I have not got around to doing the video. So a massive apology to Apis Engineering. This is brilliant. We slightly modded it here just to suit Richard, but it's essentially a piece of bent aeroplane-grade aluminium that is Perfect for grafting in the car. So Richard's got his grafting frame there. We need a few other bits as well. So the first one is a grafting frame like this. You can see how it's been rebated like that and it just slots into the frame. And then we like to use the JZBZ cups just because they're so easy. You take the little cell cup, you pop it in there. If it doesn't stick, you just give it a little twist and then it is not going anywhere. Richard's prepared all of these ready to go. So these ones here are just empty. And now I'll give you a close-up there of the JZBZ cups. Do the twist test. The twist test is really important. You push them in and then just turn them up to 90 degrees until they go really nice and tight and they will stay there indefinitely. The next job is to graft these young larvae and to get them in the cell cups. So there are tons of different grafting tools on the market. Me and Richard actually agree on this one. We like the Chinese grafting tool. There's loads that we don't agree on, but we definitely agree on this. The Chinese grafting tool I find is the best for beginners. That's not to say that intermediate and advanced people like Richard don't use it, but it's definitely best for beginners. Gives you the ability to stick young larvae onto the actual end of that bamboo skewer, but it also gives you a mechanism for getting them off. I find getting them off for beginners is the difficult bit. They can get it up onto the end, and then they squish it taking it off. Richard has incredibly high success rates with takes. So Richard is going to show us now how he gets those larvae out, and then we're going to show you the correct size, and we're going to put some into those cell cups. So Richard uses a really good pair of magnification glasses. You can see it's got the light on there. And what the Apis Engineering stand does is it gives Richard the ability to be able to go in at exactly the right angle. Now the original stand had some adjustment on the back, but it wasn't quite enough adjustment for Richard, so he's just modified it there with a piece of ply. But what Richard does, he gets the glasses on, he goes in with his grafting tool. First one here, he's already taking it out. So that's Richard's first graft attempt there, straight in, no misfires. And this is the size of larva that you're looking for. Look how small that larva is. It's not even covering the tip. Look how much royal jelly is accompanying it. That is really, really important. This is the size that you're looking for. We're going to fast forward a little bit in a second. Richard's going to graft a larva that is too big and then we'll be able to like compare them side by side. Hopefully we've got one like that on this frame, but that is the size that you're looking for. So the job now is for Richard to try and get that young larva off the grafting tool and into the base of the cup with no damage. You cannot damage the larva. Even the slightest bit of damage and the bees will If you're choosing the JZBZ cups, go for the darker ones because it's much easier to see the larva like this. The blue or the black I find are the best. But look how small that larva is inside that cup, absolutely tiny. So I set Richard the task there of trying to find the biggest larva on this frame to show you how big is too big. So that's the biggest one on this frame. You'll see bigger larva than that out there as well. That is way, way too big. I'd say that's probably 4 times the size and the mass of the previous one. It's huge. I see a lot of people grafting at this size, and all that that does is the bees will still raise a queen, but you get a much shorter duration where they're fed exclusively on royal jelly. To make good queens, you need to maximize that period, and you also need to provide them with the resources to create the jelly. The first step on that is to get the very smallest larva you possibly can. So this is the comparison there between the correct size larva and the incorrect size larva. I've got one that's tiny, one that's big and chubby. But there's another really interesting useful tool on the JZBZ cup. There is actually a circle imprint at the bottom, and you look at the big chubby lava, it's slightly smaller than the bigger imprint, but then you zoom in a little bit further and you'll see on the smaller one, the lava is almost exactly the same size as the pupil of the JZBZ cup. It gives you the perfect size lava, so you know if you've got it wrong, you know if you've got it right. So a really important note, something I didn't show you 24 hours ago in this video, The frame feeder that's in this bottom box there, Richard put 1:1 sugar syrup in there and filled it right up to the top. Probably about a couple of liters of sugar syrup, 1:1, so that's 1 kilogram of sugar, 1 kilogram of water. Mix them up, cold mix, and add it into the frame feeder all the way up to the top. Don't forget to add the float. If you don't add a float in frame feeders, you'll end up with a lot of dead bees. This is how the colony is set up now. We've got an entrance here at the front. There's another entrance at the back where all of the bees in the top box will fly out, go off and do their normal thing. and come back into this main entrance. It's called bleeding bees. We're reducing the amount of bees in the top box. They're all being compressed down into this bottom box. The queen is still up there with just enough bees to keep her company, and we've still got that 2-inch air gap now between a queen with a few attendants and all of the rest of the bees down here. They think they're queenless already, as you will see when we take out that frame of larva. That frame of larva, the bees will have already started creating emergency cells Because they think they have not got a queen. We're going to remove that frame and replace it with grafts, and then we're going to fill that feeder back up again. But before we do that, let me show you inside and just remind you of that exact setup. So you can see the entrance down there at the bottom, the other entrance is there, so opposing entrances. So this is a really important piece here. Look at all those bees clustering up there. That is what the 2-inch gap is for. If you don't give them the 2-inch gap, you cause real issues with overcrowding. But the 2-inch gap serves another purpose. That's a huge amount of bees there that acts as a block for the queen's pheromone, which means that everything above this cluster of bees feels like it's queen right, but everything below it, because of the compression of the bees in that gap, feels like they're queenless. And that is how you raise queen cells. So Richard made a really good point there, one that I should definitely get in. The amount of bees that are in this bottom box and this top box emanates heat upwards throughout the colony. So even though the queen is up there with just a few bees, she's perfectly tended to. She's still got her nurse bees and the temperature is just right for her. So this is the configuration: frame feeder full of syrup, pollen frame here. This is the one that's got larva in it. These two frames here are capped frames of brood. We're going to remove this frame here that's going to have queen cells on it, and we are going to replace it with our grafts. So Richard's just shaken off all the bees there because the bees have already started creating emergency cells on this frame. You have to remove this frame before you put the grafts in. If you leave this frame in and put the grafts in, they'll just focus on these ones here. They're queenless, but you need to create this slot of hopelessly queenless. Don't worry about over here where you're still going to have some eggs and larvae. This is the important slot. You need to take this out. So this is what this one looks like here now. You can see a few eggs and larvae, a bit of capped brood, but this is the important bit. This is the beginning of emergency cells. So you can see I've just opened them up there and you've got a nice big chubby larva inside. We have to take this frame out, otherwise the whole process fails. So we've got a slot here now, slot 2, and that is where we're gonna place our frame of grafts. I like to just kind of let it fall in like that, never push it in. And there you go, that's into position now. The final thing we need to do now that I'll leave Richard to do is just to top that feeder right up, 1:1 sugar syrup. You cannot skimp on the syrup. So then all that is left to do is put everything back together in exactly the same way. Your board goes back on, entrance facing the back. Brood box comes back on with honey stores, whatever, but most importantly the queen. And obviously Richard's got his polyashworth feeder, but it is just an insulated crown board. That is the starter finisher complete, and all you need to do now is wait until a couple of days before those virgin queens will emerge. I always like to stick this graphic up here, it's very helpful. Shows you the 3 days that the egg is an egg, shows you on day 4 that it hatches out into a larva, shows you when it's capped, and it shows you when it's going to emerge. You need to work out when those larvae there are going to emerge. Go back 48 hours, and that is the day that we're going to come back and harvest these cells. So you might notice we're jumping all around the apiary here, but the setup is exactly the same. Queen rearing is an iterative process. Richard only ever uses each one of these setups once, and then he just moves on to the next one for each and every graft. So in this apiary here, there are hundreds of colonies. We've got one on day 0, we've got one on day 1, this one here is on day So everything you've seen up until this point has happened on this hive here. And on day 4, Richard comes in to do a couple of checks. So Richard's gonna start going through the colony. Same thing applies. We've got the queen up in the top box, a few bees there. We've got our mesh board in place, but there's not quite as many bees using it now because they're all down in this bottom box. We've still got a reasonable-sized cluster there, but nowhere near as much as the beginning, which is good. And then we've got our grafting frame here. So this one's obviously flipped round. We're working from the other side. So we've got frame feeder, pollen frame, grafts, and 2 frames of capped brood. This frame here is going to be very important today, but let's get the graphs out first and see what the take's like. So as you can see, Richard's not happy with that because there's not perfection. You know, there's a missed one here and a missed one there, but it's not about the missed ones. Missed ones will always happen. What is important here is the amount of nurse bees that you've got and the way that they're drawing down those cells. So you can see beautiful white wax being drawn there. Only 2 missed cells on that top bar. Richard doesn't do anything with the missed ones though. He just leaves them there. The bees will sort it all out. So what Richard did while I was showing you the grafts there is he's gone through every single frame, taken out the frames, shaken off the bees, and removed any cells if they are creating them inside the colony. That will just reinforce that the only way that these bees can create themselves a new queen is to go and feed the grafts royal jelly. And Richard finds day 4 is the perfect time to go in and do that. So that's what the colony's set up like now on day 4. We're going to move over to another and final starter finisher that is on day 10. where all of the cells are fully capped over. So here we are at the final starter finisher and we are here on day 10. So we're going to go inside and see some fully capped over queen cells. And again, Richard doesn't know what the take is like here. Do you reckon it'll be better or worse than the last one, Richard? A bit better. He's going to think it's going to be better. What we're also going to show you, and I'm going to go straight in and show you first, is the top box. We're going to show you how many bees are in there, how much brood is in there, where the queen is, and you'll see the massive reduction in the amount of bees in that top box. Because they've all been bled downstairs. So the idea was to compress all of the bees from this top box here into the bottom box, and as you can see, we left a gap with those frames, but not many bees at all. They've already started to kick out the drones over there, drones hanging out in the corner, and Richard's going to start taking out some of these frames now and showing you what is left, and there really isn't much. You've got a couple of frames there with a little bit of capped brood on, and you can see all of that brood is emerging, but not many bees, only just enough bees to cover the frame. And to ensure that the brood is kept at the correct temperature. The queen is still here, plenty of bees there to keep that queen in really, really good condition. And I'll give you a super close-up of that queen now because she is stunning. So there's my queen, a beautiful F1 Buckfast queen, absolutely stunning. Look at her going along there in perfect condition, kept up in that top box. So you can see not much going up in that top box at all, and that is because they are all downstairs working very, very hard. So I've seen Richard's grafting before. I reckon we're gonna beat him for a treat on this one. So this is day 10 now and all of the cells are completely capped over. Still got a huge amount of bees up there, the nurse bees clustering up, keeping them nice and warm. A really, really good quality grafting frame there. Now once they get to this point, the bees no longer feed them because obviously the cells are capped over. They just need to keep them at the correct temperature, the correct humidity, and all of that magic takes place within the cell. And then on day 17, that queen will emerge. But the way Richard does it is he takes these cells out on day 14 or day 15. The cells at that point are fine to be handled, and he just moves them around in the apiary, sets up a nice queenless nuc, and drops in a cell. I'm going to show you exactly how he does that next, but let's take a super close-up look at these cells first. So you can see they're perfectly drawn out cells, big chubby cells, beautiful wax, very well dimpled, which is exactly what you want. And a fantastic take as well. There's only a single cell missed on each frame there, which is very, very good. But it's not about the ones you miss, it's about the quality of the ones you create. And these ones here are brilliant. So beautiful cells there, really equal length, which is very good. Shows that the larvae were all the same age when they were grafted. So today is day 10 and you do not want to transport your cells on day 10. So we're just going to fast forward 4 days. So we're back here now, 96 hours later, in exactly the same clothes. It is amazing. We got it set up perfectly. But it is now day 14 now. All of these cells here are 2 or 3 days away from emerging. Richard's going to take 3 of these cells now and go and place them into the pre-prepared queenless nucs. So Richard just uses his hive tool there, really gently levers them off. Even on day 14, you have to be super gentle with queen cells. If you're transporting them anywhere, you need to keep them at the right temperature, at the right humidity. But if you're moving them around within the apiary, you can just put them in your hand like this. And then keep it nice and warm. Don't let them dry out, don't keep them in the sun, and place them straight into your nucs. So it's still day 14, we just moved around in the apiary. Richard's got the 3 queen cells that are due to emerge in maybe 2 or 3 days, and he's got this pre-prepared nuc here. So we're going to take a look inside this nuc now. The way that Richard makes it up is he goes to his apiary, he's trying to get 3 frames of capped brood, minimum of 2 frames of stores, and then he likes to have a slot there for a frame of foundation just to give him a little bit of a buffer. That was made up 24 hours ago. There's no delay here. You make it up, 24 hours later we're placing in these cells that are on day 14. That's what we're going to do now. I'm going to get my veil up and we'll take a look inside. So as I'm opening this up here, you'll see Richard's keeping those cells nice and warm. You do need to keep them at the correct temperature, otherwise they can get chilled very quickly. Looking in here though, not an overly stocked nuc, but much, much bigger than you have to make earlier on in the year. We're making up these nucs now. This is probably the last round. Early July, and you can see here pretty much full of bees, maybe 5 frames of bees. You've got your 3 frames of brood, 2 frames of stores, and then this extra frame of foundation here. Really important to have that extra frame because it just gives you a little bit of a buffer while you're waiting for these queens to get mated. So then all Richard does, he takes one of those queen cells on day 14, places it directly in the middle just like that there, closes it up, and then he doesn't come back for 21 days, so 3 weeks. In that time, the virgin queen will emerge within about 48 hours, hopefully get accepted, few days for her to become sexually mature. She'll go out on her mating flight, she'll come back in, and then 3 weeks later, Richard likes to see them mated, laying eggs and brood in all stages. Before we get to that point in this video though, we're going to go and take a look at a colony where the queen has emerged 3 or 4 days ago, and hopefully we can see a virgin around that is only a couple of days away from mating. We'll pack all this one up, it's literally just over there. We are getting towards the good bit in this video. So really important observation there. Look how well the bees are responding to that queen cell. They are immediately attracted to it because they can sense what is inside. This colony here is not hopelessly queenless. It is just queenless. But the idea here is that virgin is going to emerge before the colony can do anything to create themselves their own queen. And as always with queen rearing, it's the first queen out that is always going to win. So let's take a look inside. We have got beautiful weather here today, 21, 22 degrees. There is literally no wind at all, and it is the time of the day where the queens are out mating as well. It's about 2 o'clock here today, so perfect mating weather, and we can see some of the queens going out on their mating flights. This one here shouldn't be quite there yet, so this one here is about 4 days after emergence. The queen needs to become sexually mature, but she is due to go out for a mating flight either tomorrow or the day after or somewhere around there. Hopefully we get good weather. The weather is perfect. We've got a really nice long stretch of warm weather with very low wind, which is what you want. And luckily in this site here, we flood it with the very best quality drones and we are in the middle of nowhere. So we have really good control over both the maternal side and the paternal side. The maternal side comes from the grafts, from the larva. because they're from a selected mother queen. The paternal side comes from the drones in the air, and the only way to control that is to flood your area with lots and lots and lots of really good drones. Now, if you take a look at these drone shots here, there is no messing around whatsoever. There are hundreds of colonies here, tens of thousands of the very best, purest, buckfast drones in the air, and that is how we get our colonies so super calm. So finding virgin queens, really difficult. They're not that much bigger than a normal-sized bee. They move very quickly. They can fly off, very timid, very nervous. Richard's just working his way through seeing if we can find it. If you're following this process, definitely do not do this. You take the cells, you put them in on day 14, you come back 3 weeks later. I'm only doing this just to kind of fill in the gaps and show you that intermediate step, which is the queen before she's been out on her mating flight. So there we go, there's our virgin queen. You can see she's quite dark, she's not that much bigger than any of the other bees, she's timid, she's running around, she's definitely not been out on her mating flight. Yeah, so we're gonna get this queen back in. Don't like to disturb virgins, but that is what they look like before they're mated. So as I said, don't include that step if you're doing it at home. We're gonna jump to 3 weeks later. So we put the cells in on day 14. 3 weeks later, this is what the colonies will look like once that queen's been out on her mating flight, come back, settled down, started to lay eggs. And then and only then when you see those eggs have transformed into a beautiful capped worker brood pattern, do you give that queen the seal of approval and she is ready to go into winter as a UK-mated, F1 Buckfast Queen from Black Mountain Honey. So it's 3 weeks later, and before we take a look inside this colony here, if you are interested in buying either Langstroth or National overwintered nucs with the very best and calmest UK-raised F1 Buckfast Queens, take a look below this video in YouTube. There's 2 options there. The Welsh ones are raised here. If you want the Welsh ones, hit the Welsh overwintered nucs and you may even get this very colony here. They are so calm, they are so chilled out, they are perfect for your garden. But believe me, they do sell out very, Very quickly, get your orders in quick, get them reserved, and you'll be top of the list for spring 2026. So we finally made it to the end of the video, and we are going in here today to check to see if those queens, those virgin queens, have gone out and successfully mated. Three weeks later, that's plenty of time for the queen to have emerged. Virgin queen, few days for her to become sexually mature. She then goes out on a really nice, calm, warm, mild day. You don't want it too hot. You don't want it too cold. What is very important is the Wind. You do not want higher wind speeds. Here in this valley, it's flooded with exceptional F1 Buckfast drones. And then if we get days like we've got today, 21, 22 degrees, 5 or 6 mile an hour winds, you could not get better conditions for raising queens. So Richard's found the queen, but you can see the temperament of this colony here. We're going in. This is the first time this queen and this colony has ever been inspected, and look how calm and gentle they are. So you can see the queen is there. She's plumped right out, really nice and chubby, and she is laying an exceptional pattern. But all we've got at the moment is eggs and open larva. That is not enough to confirm that this is a good quality mated queen. We need to see that capped worker brood pattern. So I don't think there's any question there at all. That is an exceptional laying pattern. You can see where she's left out the zigzag of the wire, which is perfectly normal, but that there is an exceptional mating pattern. Beautiful Langstroth frames, perfect for your Flow Hive. It doesn't come much better than that. So the only thing left now is to get this colony here ready for winter and ready for our customers in 2026. It's simple. 2 Apivar strips go in early August into a big Langstroth nuc like this. At that point, they're fed 1:1 sugar syrup because Richard knows all they're going to do is convert that into winter bees. When he comes back, takes those Apivar strips out, he gives them another really big feed with some invert sugar syrup, and then he says goodbye for the season because he knows he's done absolutely everything to get them through. Richard's overwintering success rate is above 98%. That is exceptional. These bees are exceptional. If you want to get yourself some Black Mountain Honey overwintered nucs, the link is directly below.