In this vlog, Laurence Edwards inspects an F1‑mated daughter colony derived from his pure German Buckfast queen sourced from Lutz Eggert. He describes the colony’s rapid buildup, extensive drawn comb, and strong honey flow, noting inherited traits such as fast expansion and gentle temperament, as well as some increased flightiness typical of F1 genetics. Edwards explains his ongoing genetic management strategy: removing aggressive colonies, killing problematic queens, and re‑queening with superior stock to improve future generations. He walks through the hive, showing drawn frames, brood patterns, and the lack of a visible queen, and discusses preparing the colony for winter, including adding a second deep box and monitoring brood health. The video serves both as an update on the offspring of his breeder queens and a practical demonstration of hive assessment and seasonal management.
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Today I'm going to show you one of my F1 daughters from my pure German Buckfast queen from Lutz Eggert. So I've given you loads of updates on the actual pure queens, how they're getting on, how they're building up, how they're getting through winter. I've not done a huge amount of videos on the offspring, and that's really what I should be showing you here is the offspring of those breeder queens. So in today's video, we're going to go ahead, take a look at one of the F1 mated daughters from my pure German Buckfast queen from Lutz Eggert. You'll be amazed, she is a real beauty. The pure German Buckfast mother is next door. Now I'm going to show you inside the daughter The F1 daughter from my pure German Buckfast from Lutz Eggerts. Only started off really small this year. It was mated around June time. Mated it in a nuc, got it going, upgraded it to a National Deep, and then about 2 weeks ago I had to put another National Deep box on because it was really, really crowded in there. Definitely inherited that trait from the mother, which is incredibly fast buildup. Let's get inside, see how they compare. So a really positive start is that they've completely drawn out all of those wax foundation frames that I put on there about 2 weeks ago. They've definitely inherited that ability to build up really, really quickly. That's something I always look for. Something that's not quite as good though is they're definitely a bit more flighty. And this is the issue with F1, is that you can't always perfectly control the drones in the vicinity. We know in this apiary here we've got a couple of outliers, a couple of aggressive colonies. Doing my best to get rid of those. In fact, I've killed one of the queens already, and later on today I'll be killing another one. So next year's batch of queens should be iteratively better because I'm constantly taking out the nasty genetics and requeening them with real superior genetics that I'm buying in from lots of different people. So it was about 10 days ago I put those in. You can see still got foundation in the corner, very, very strong flow, and the bees have made the most of it to draw out all of that center of the frame. And smelling it is really nice, pungent Lingheather honey. So you can see now I'm standing right in front of the entrance here, and just when I walked away there, you could see a lot of the bees actually went back into the beehive. So that's a very, very good sign in that maybe the flying bees were more because I blocking the entrance. You look at them now, okay, not quite as calm as the mother, but still looking really, really nice. So a few more frames there that they've drawn out, nothing completely capped over though, but pretty much that whole box has been drawn out at least a little bit on every single frame. And as I pull out these frames here, you can see they're not going for me anymore. So I think that was just a little bit of me standing in front of the entrance and not giving them the benefit of the doubt. Again, I've not smoked these either, so if you smoke them, they should react a little bit better, but I like to see how they react without any smoke at all. So a really big bustling hive of bees, completely full. They were long overdue an additional brood box, so they're going to be backfilling this brood nest with honey still. I'll pull out a couple of frames, see if we can find the queen, see if we can see some brood, and then we're going to get these guys ready for winter. So I'm just pulling out a frame here from the brood nest, and a very similar trait to the mother in that They're not flying up all over me, so they are gentle. They really have inherited that gene as well. And then when I look inside the brood, I'm seeing some really beautiful brood patterns. Very nice brood patterns, actually, I have to say, for this time of the year. They're going for it, they're creating those winter bees. And nice to see that they're not coming for me even when I'm pulling the frames of brood out. See there, really beautiful, nice frame of brood. Some interesting late-season orange pollen on this one on the back. I'll just flip it over so you See if you can spot the bee there with the very bright orange pollen. I'll have to look that one up, see what it is. Definitely not ling heather, but good to see nice healthy brood frame, and they really have calmed down now I'm into this colony again. Lovely frame of brood, really nice healthy looking brood, very well mated queen. Just counting up the frames there, probably on about six or seven frames, which I would say is maybe average for this year. Don't find many colonies where you've still got like nine or ten frames. They definitely start compressing it down. But that is a lovely frame of brood, well-mated queen, very nice and healthy. So no sign of the queen. I'm not going to go looking for her any further because she could be anywhere. The colony's getting ready for winter. The behavior of them is very nice. They're building up strong, and all we can do is try and eliminate the bad colonies, replace them with good colonies, and see if we can get better and better each year.
