In this vlog episode, Laurence Edwards recounts a failed requeening attempt where his target colony swarmed, producing numerous swarm cells and losing its queen. He discovers both virgin and a mated queen within the hive, revealing that the swarm was triggered by excess space in the brood area and a very young queen. Edwards explains his original plan to locate and kill a virgin to reset the colony, but instead decides to remove the mated queen for use elsewhere, leaving the hive temporarily queenless while retaining eggs. He outlines the next steps: wait about eight days, then eliminate remaining swarm cells and introduce a new F1 Buckfast queen to improve temperament and avoid “angry genetics.” Throughout, he emphasizes transparency by showing his mistakes, discusses the importance of maintaining F1 genetics rather than allowing the colony to fall to F2, and provides observations on the colony’s aggressive behavior, space management, and the practical challenges of requeening aggressive hives.
Chapters
How to Requeen an Angry Beehive, episode 5, has spectacularly failed. The colony has swarmed. I can't believe it. How annoying is that? I've come up here today, gone through all of the frames. There are open swarm cells, as in emerged virgins, loads of virgins running around. The queen has gone. This is an absolute disaster class. But because it's Black Mountain Honey, I will always show you my errors. I'll show you my mistakes. We can get this one back on track quite easily. What we're going to have to do though is we're going to have to go in there today, find the virgin, hope that she's the only virgin, kill that virgin, get them back to hopelessly queenless, start the cycle all over again, and then we will end the season with a colony that's got a good F1 Buckfast queen in it. If I let these go down to F2, then I'm reliant on the local drones in the area, and I have been flooding this area with really horrible drones for my checkerboarded colony. So this apiary, I'm doing a clean sweep, taking out every single queen late on in the year, but I'm definitely not risking a Buckfast queen down at F2 on a series where I'm trying to requeen a colony to get rid of angry genetics. That's definitely not what we're doing here.
But I thought I'd just give you the update.
I thought I'd be completely honest with you. These things don't always go to plan. The colony and the queen had absolutely loads of space down in the brood area, and they just decided to swarm. They They put loads of swarm cells down there. I missed it 'cause I thought they're in the process of requeening. Very, very young queen, filling 6 or 7 frames in the brood area, loads of space above. They do not need weekly inspections. And how wrong was I? They've swarmed. So we're gonna slightly reset things. Okay, it gives you a nice insight into what goes wrong in a bee farmer's life, but it also gives you a little bit more of a challenge in this series as well. We need to get in there. We need to find a virgin, which is pretty much impossible. If I find the virgin, I'm going to say this before I do it on camera. If I find her, I'm going to kill her, and then I'm going to show you the dead virgin. Because I've tried to do this on videos before where you try to go and film the virgin and then she just flies off, and then you've not filmed her and she's not dead. So if I find her, I will kill her and then I will film her, and then that way I know the colony is back to queenless again. So enough of me talking, enough of me getting stuff wrong. Let's get my bee suit on and let's go and show you how not to requeen colonies by letting them swarm.
Right, let's get inside this colony here, see if we can find the virgin. It's so funny because there is a certain irony here in that we were trying to requeen this colony over here because they're aggressive.
We're using F1 genetics to try and make things better, and directly behind the camera I have got the most horrible colony in the world. My own bees. They're not F1 Buckfast, they're actually a different line. Not a line that I sell, I might add. And I can just see them there, they're pinging me, they're going absolutely wild. Look down to the colony here and there's kind of no bees at the entrance at all. So we'll get inside, we'll see if we can find that virgin, we'll see if we can find a couple of those frames that shows you that the colony has indeed swarmed, if they haven't taken that down by now, and then we'll get back on track by adding in a new F1 Buckfast queen once we know this colony is hopelessly queenless.
So here we go, the bees are coming out now. They're not too, too bad. Got at least a few cycles of F1 Buckfast in there, but they're queenless at the moment, so they're definitely still a little bit tetchy.
Still got some of the older generation bees in there as well.
Would be getting to the point now where I'd be saying I think we're going to start seeing improvements in temperament, but because they swarmed, they've gone back to being— yep, not very nice at all. And it's interesting to see because they just had loads of space in the brood box.
I'll get a close-up and I'll show you that now.
So you can see in here that we've got a couple of frames that are not really being used that much. That white one, the light-looking one in the middle, is barely drawn out, mostly foundation.
And I've got the same on this side here as well. So very strange, but sometimes Sometimes bees do that.
They don't always swarm due to space, and sometimes they'll go before they're really due to go. We spoke about the temperament, but look at the bees going for the camera here. Gonna have like scents of other bees where bees have attacked this camera before, and the bees there, they are sensing that and they are properly going for my camera. Just got a sting on the finger there as well through my gloves.
So yeah, we still got a really nasty, horrible colony of bees that need quite a lot of work.
So this frame is so, so interesting. What you can see here is where they're started to take down those cells, but that is the remnants of swarm cells. I've got another one there, a couple more on this frame as well, another one there. But then look at the edge, it didn't even draw the whole frame out before they started going to swarm. And these aren't supersedure cells, these are definitely swarm cells. I've counted about 20 in this colony now. They were definitely desperate to go ahead and swarm, and they did because I lost loads and loads of bees. Very, very interesting frame, that one, though. Tells you a real story. Well, I know I said I was going to kill that virgin if I found her, but it turns out I've got a mated queen in here.
So I'm not going to kill this queen because these bees, they're not the worst.
I can go and use them somewhere else in a different apiary.
I'm going to take that queen away though and get this colony back to queenless. Not hopelessly queenless because there's lots of eggs.
Queen is clearly mated. Not sure how good that mating is just yet, but we will come back and we'll take a look. But today we're making this colony queenless by going away, taking that queen. And we'll come back in 8 days and we will start this process again. There we go. Hopefully you can see that queen is in a cage. I'll go and take that off.
I'll use that elsewhere.
Always keep a little fondant cage like that just for this very purpose. But this colony is now queenless again. Because there's eggs in there, they're not hopelessly queenless, and they will almost certainly go back to trying to create new cells from those eggs. So I'm not going to introduce a queen yet because there's no need for me to do that.
I have queens all the way throughout the season.
I'll come back in 8 days, I'll show you this on the video, I'll knock down the cells again, and we'll put in another F1 Buckfast queen.
