Laurence Edwards shows how to build nucleus boxes with mature queen cells to produce mated queens. Grafts from high-quality stock are reared into F1 queens and mated in a remote apiary flooded with drones, ensuring superior genetics and calm temperament. The finished nucs are full-size, proven queens that have been overwintered before Black Mountain Honey ships them.
In this video, I'm going to show you how we add mature queen cells into a nucleus to try and get the queens mated. In the previous video, we showed you how to use a queen right method to get mature queen cells. Now we're going to show you how we add them into our nuc boxes. So what Rich has got down there is a nuc box that he made up about 4 or 5 days ago. The way that he made up these nuc boxes is he took 2 frames of brood in all stages, but preferably capped Brood, and preferably emerging brood. Added in a frame of stores, and then within 15 minutes he added in the mature queen cell and just hung it in between the frames. What you can see there, we've got 2 little mini colonies here, over 3 frames each, metal divider in the middle, and then we've got the Easy Bees queen cell cups there, and they're just hung in the middle. We're going to get inside, see if we can find the virgin, It's about 4 days since she emerged. She's definitely not gonna be mated yet, but hopefully we'll see that the mature queen cell has emerged, and you never know, we might see a virgin. So while Richard's gone off to find his hive tool, it's just nice to stay again. There are hundreds of colonies in this apiary. Look how close I'm getting to these bees here. They just don't care that I'm here. Everything here is bred to be as gentle as it can possibly be. I'm going to get my veil back on now before I get stung in the face. So you can see on the frames there, beautifully calm bees, lots of nurse bees on there, and Richard's doing his best to see if we can find a virgin running round. About 3 or 4 days ago, that mature queen cell went in there, but what it means is it's highly unlikely that the virgins have left yet. Now you do want to be careful. It's not really worth your while going and searching for virgins. You can scare them off, but the fact that this one here is going to be so young, Definitely not going to be able to fly yet. Hopefully we can show you just how big those virgins look. So while Richard's off over looking for virgins— I've got one. You've got one? But he's interrupted me perfectly there. He's just found a virgin. I was just going to say how calm and gentle these bees are. I'll put these down. Let's go and have a look at the virgin that Richard's found. So there you go, you can see the virgin running around on the frame there. She's probably 1 or 2 days old, maybe 3 days old, but she'll take her time to become sexually mature. Not too skittish, and then she will go off and she will mate. What Richard does after that is once he gets one or two frames of nice capped worker brood from that new queen there, they get upgraded into their Payne's poly nucs, and then they get built up ready to overwinter. Once that queen goes out and gets mated, we wait until she's laying up about a frame or two full national deep frames of brood, and then she'll get transferred over Into a Payne's nuc, built up, ready to overwinter. You can see the virgin there. She's trying to hide, but she's not too skittish at all. Really beautiful color, very orange. Nice big long abdomen already before she's even gone out and mated. And you've seen on other videos just how big these queens get once they've been out to mate. Right, so Richard's gone ahead and found the 2 virgins in there, and as I said, they'll go out and get mated now. But I just want to give another shout out to these bees here. We spend a lot of money on good quality breeding stock, and as I said in previous videos, what Richard does, he takes the grafts from that breeding stock, turns them into F1 queens, they get mated in this apiary here, and then he chooses the very best F1 queens to remain here in this apiary. So you get your pure breeder queens, the drones from them are flooding the apiary, but then the pure drones that are produced by the F1 queens are also flooding the apiary. And not just any old F1s, they're the selected F1s, the best of the best that stay here in a very, very remote location, which means that we're able to flood this valley with drones, which means that the F1 queens that are getting mated here are very, very influenced by the amount of good quality genetics that has in the air because of those drones. These aren't local mongrel matings, as you can see from the calmness of the bees on this frame here. Can't do this with all bees. This isn't set up, this is genuinely just how calm these bees are. A couple of things that I really like about this method, I'm quite proud of the fact that these are the nucs that we sell at Black Mountain Honey, is the fact that we're using proper nucs to get them mated. These aren't Apidaias, they're not small mini mating nucs, The queens that are being sent out are mated the previous year between May and August. They're then building up all the way throughout the late summer, and then they overwinter here, and then we send them out to our customers. So not only are they good quality genetics, but they're proven queens that have been through that long process, checked, made sure that they're laying properly on big frames, not just little mini Apidea frames. We only send the very, very best queens out to our customers. So I hope you enjoyed that little mini-series there showing you how we make our queen cells, how we get those queens mated. I'm going to follow it up now showing you exactly how we make up our nucs going into winter.
