Laurence Edwards checks a hive requeened with a 2022 Buckfast queen to calm an aggressive colony. The new queen's daughters are noticeably calmer than the original bees, though the hive still has flighty workers. He'll relocate it to an isolated apiary once the new queen's offspring dominate, then run a clean temperament test.
Right, it's been a couple of weeks now since we requeened this angry hive. It's a beautiful day today, perfect opportunity to get in there, make sure the queen's laying up that brood properly. We'll have a look at the temperament, but I'm not going to judge their temperament just yet. Just want to get in there and give you a snapshot, show you the queen, show you the brood that she's laying, and we'll take a look and see how the bees are getting on. Right, so we still got a lot of flight. I've got 2 really nice heavy supers up there as well, so it's not set back the bees too much doing the requeening, but they're still a little bit flighty. Obviously these are the old bees from the old queen. She was too aggressive. You can kind of see that now. Obviously I'm not getting battered. You look at some of my A3s, the bees are a lot worse than this, but they're very flighty still here. I think once we get this Buckfast queen in here and you start to see her daughters coming through, you'll notice that they're nowhere near as flighty. Let's get in though, take a look, see how they're getting on. So we're seeing some really nice expansion down here. They weren't covering all these frames before. There are probably only over about 4 or 5 frames, and they're pretty much filling this box now. I think I'm going to double brood them because Buckfast do like a lot of space and they're still in their growing mode of the year. I'll open it up though, see if we can find the queen. But good to see just how much brood has expanded and how big this colony is getting. I'm getting a little bit hounded, but it's so unfair to judge these bees for 2 reasons. One, like I said, these are not going to be the daughters of the new Buckfast queen. But also I've got the colony next door and I'm completely blocking their flight path. So if I move out the way like this, most of the bees have just gone back into that other hive. So okay, not a Perfect experiment. But what I'm going to do with this colony is once I think we've got to the point where most of the bees are the new Buckfast queen's daughters, we will take her to a separate apiary with no other bees in it, and then we will judge them there. And that'll give us the ability to really judge the difference in the temperament of this colony without the interference from any other bees. So there's my queen, 2022 yellow-marked Buckfast queen. I have to say, just noticing the daughters of this queen on the frame, you can see the difference in colour, but they really aren't very flighty on this frame at all. It's the bees in the air that are flighty. So we're already starting to see really small incremental change from this colony in terms of the daughters that are hatching out from this queen here. I'll pull out a couple more frames now just to show you how well the queen's laying, but I'm happy with that as a frame of brood for the first round or 2 of eggs. So I just thought I'd pull out a frame here. Not a perfect frame of brood, but you have to give the queen a few weeks just to get into her lay properly. That's a nice pattern of brood though. Not perfect, but the queen will improve over time. So there we go. Just wanted to do a quick update just to show you that queen settling in, laying her eggs, turning it into brood. I'm going to leave this one, I'm going to park this video now for a good few weeks, and then we'll transfer this colony somewhere else and we'll start doing the inspections there. It'll give you a really good feel for how this colony's performing and how you can convert a really horrible, angry colony of bees into a nice, gently friendly colony of bees just by adding a good quality mated queen.
