In this instructional video, Laurence Edwards revisits an aggressive honeybee colony a week after introducing a yellow‑marked F1 Buckfast queen. He walks through the inspection of the brood box, removes the queen cage, and checks the fondant tabs for consumption, indicating the bees have released the queen. He looks for the queen on the frames and confirms successful introduction by finding eggs and spotting the marked queen walking on the comb. Edwards explains that the colony will need at least three months of regular weekly swarm inspections before its temperament can be evaluated, emphasizing patience and ongoing monitoring. He highlights that the simple introduction method using a marked F1 Buckfast queen consistently works, and he plans to provide future updates on brood development and colony behavior.
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Right, it's been about a week now. This is the angry hive. Quite nice on a day like today. Let's go inside, see if that queen's been released. Once the queen's been released, we've checked for eggs, we can just leave this colony to it, obviously doing our normal weekly swarm inspections, but it's going to take at least 3 months before we're going to assess how angry this colony is. We'll do regular updates to show you the improvements that we see week on week, but as I said before, don't do it and then 2 weeks later think, oh, my bees are still angry. You do need to give it time. Let's get inside, see if it was a successful queen introduction. So we don't need to worry about the top boxes now. Previous episodes we went in, took out all of the emergency cells from the top boxes where the queen was allowed to roam previously. All we're worried about now is the brood box. So there's my cage. I'm gonna get that out now, see if the bees made it out. The bees aren't overly fussed about it, which leads me to believe we're gonna be in a good position and we're gonna find that queen walking around on the frames. So queen cage is there. Fondant tabs have been completely opened. They've eaten through the fondant. There's a few bees knocking around in there, but there's no queen knocking around in there. She's either dead on the floor with a failed introduction, or we're going to find her wandering around on a frame. I always get a little bit nervous at this point. Let's get in, see if we can find that queen. Well, we're definitely on to a winner. First frame, not found the queen, but I've got eggs. Always love that when you come back a week later and there's eggs. Don't worry if you don't see eggs. It can take kind of like 2 or 3 weeks for those queens to come back into lay. But I know for a fact now that there is going to be a queen knocking around here. Let's go and find that yellow marked introduced F1 Buckfast queen. And there she is. I'll let you zoom in on that bit, see if you can see the queen. We've got one successful introduction with one yellow F1 Buckfast queen. I'll give you a little bit of a close-up on that now. So there's my queen. She's trying to get back down. Stay there for a little bit while we talk about you. Nicely marked. She's been accepted. We've got eggs on the frames. Just going to lift that up because I don't want to go in anywhere. So there she is. I always get a little bit worried when they run down like that because I don't know where they've gone. But there we go. Simple introduction. That method Method works every time. She's already laying eggs. We're going to close it up now, let her get on with it. We'll give them a few weeks and then I'll give you an update just to show you what some of the brood's like, and then we can assess how this colony takes to being requeened by an F1 Buckfast queen. So I've got a positive idea on the queen. I'm not going to drop her in the grass. I'm going to get her back in the colony, close everything up, and then we can come back in a few weeks, see how she's getting on.
