Laurence Edwards inspects an AMM hive with a dark queen from Jonathan Getty and finds it smaller than his Buckfast colonies, with spotty brood and signs of deformed wing virus. The first generation of AMM offspring are already visible, and he plans to treat with Apivar strips and monitor through winter.
Today I'm going to show you my AMM queen from Jonathan Getty. Been a few weeks now since I introduced this queen. If I've got the timing right, we should see the first few young bees coming out now that have that AMM lineage, and you'll be able to see the distinct difference between the Buckfast bees and the AMM bees. So I'll get my bee suit on, let's go and see how she's getting on. Right, let's see if we can find the AMM queen, hope that she's still alive, and see if we can see a difference between the young bees and the older bees. Well, first thing I've noticed is that this colony isn't anywhere near as big as the other colonies in this apiary. I I know that AMM don't cluster up anywhere near as big over winter, but I wasn't expecting it to be quite this noticeable. This was a strong colony about 5 weeks ago. Hopefully they haven't swarmed late on in the season, but they're really not looking too, too strong at the moment. However, they are defending themselves very well against that wasp that comes in. That's always good to see. I do love watching bees having a go at wasps. There she goes, she finally got away. That was good fun. So they're definitely good in their defense against wasps. And maybe I'm being a little bit too critical. You look at the box now, they're coming up to the top. Maybe that's just a really good trait that they don't like walking on the top bar. I'm not sure. Anyway, I'm not going to judge these ones until the end of next year, but let's get inside, see if we can see that queen. So there she is, my Jonathan Getty AMM queen. Isn't she beautiful? A very, very good-looking queen. Very dark, very black. You can see some of her offspring coming out there already, really dark. I feel a bit bad, some of this colony's got a little bit of deformed wing virus. It's a bit late getting my Apivar strips onto this one, so I need to get the Apivar strips onto there today. Hopefully that should clear it up. Let's see if we can find any nice frames of brood to show you. So not the best looking brood, but they could be in between cycles at the moment. Very spotty, this one. It's been laid up well though, but you can really see the transition from the orange ginger bees down to the darker bees now. You can pick them out, it's very noticeable, the ones that are the AMM and the ones that are the Buckfast. Seem to be getting on though, and there's been no problem getting that queen in there, getting her introduced. As I said, I'm not doing any judging at the moment. I'm going to wait until next year, get them through, and then give them a full season to see how they go. So there we go, the AMM queen is fine. A few jobs to do on this colony, a little bit light on food. Also need to get the Apivar strips in there, some deformed wing virus, there's some notable perforations in the cappings as well. Going to fix all of that. Hopefully they've got enough bees to build up strong enough for winter, but knowing AMM, they don't need to be as big to get through the winter, and they will go through on quite a small cluster. So I'll close them up now, and hopefully you'll see these again in 2023.
