Mated Postal Queens

Hi, I'm Lawrence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. In this video, I'm going to talk to you about ordering queens through the post. So we order a huge amount of queens through the post. We do a lot of rearing, but in North Wales, you just can't keep up with the number of queens that you need, and you get a lot of failures as well. So the weather can turn bad, and then when the weather turns bad and the queens don't mate correctly, you need to remedy that really, really quickly, or you end up with laying workers, and it happens really quick. So we order a lot of queens throughout the season, uh, and we get them delivered in. So I just wanted to give you a kind of heads up as to how we do that, how easy the process is, and then talk to you about some of the suppliers that we use as well, because there's some really top-quality suppliers out there that can, that can send you queens through the post. Little shitter. So queens through the post are great at sorting out duff colonies. So if you've got a drone-laying queen, you can squish that queen and you can replace it with a mated queen that'll come through the post. We've done that in a separate video. Great for making splits. Like, this is the biggest one for me. If you've got a colony that's booming, buy a queen, £30, £35, do a split, and you've got 2 colonies. And the fact that they're mated, oh, they go so, so quickly. So mated queens are really, really good for that. One thing I would say though is that it's, and it's definitely something that we've been caught a little bit guilty of over the years, it's chasing the duff colonies. We get some colonies that come through over winter and there's no queen, don't know where she goes, something happens to her, she probably died, but you've got like a colony full of bees with no queen, no laying workers, and it's really tempting to just kind of chuck a mated queen in there and chase that queen. It's not something that we do at Black Mountain Honey anymore. No. What we do, and we're doing this here today, is we shake out all the duff colonies and then we reassess where we are, and then we make clean splits from strong colonies using mated queens as well. We like to shake them out, strengthen up all the other colonies, and then make the splits. So this is the delivery that we've got today, is from Honeyfields Bee Farm, and I've got 10 imported queens from them. You can get them around early April, middle of April, obviously pending Brexit, it's been very difficult for all of the queen producers this year. Normally, first week of April, they're pretty much on tap. This year it's been a lot more difficult. Honeyfields have really come through for me and got me these 10 queens that I do need to make up some additional nucs. And this is how they come. It's really, really baffling that there's no ventilation, small boxes, just a couple of pinholes for ventilation, and this is, this is how they come. And they always come through fine. I can't think of one, and we must have had hundreds of queens that have come through the post, I can't think of one that's turned up dead I've had a few that have come in a bit poor condition where like a lot of the attendants are dead, but the queen's still alive. But generally they come through okay. I imported a lot from the EU last year and they came over really, really quickly. I got some from Malta and I remember I had a dispatch note on the Tuesday afternoon at 4 PM from Malta and it was delivered the next day at about half 9 in the UK. So I couldn't quite believe how quickly they get these through the post. But yeah, they come like that, they just post them through the door. It's really quick, it's really simple. So then there's various different cages that they come in. This is definitely my favourite cage. I find it the simplest to use and I find it the easiest for my introductions. There's other cages on the market as well. This is definitely the one that I like and I like best. The one that I don't like has like a tube. I'll show you a little picture of it now, and then they put fondant in that tube and I find it really difficult to, to get the introductions right on that. Not to say it can't be done, but I just find this one here so much easier and I find I can introduce them straight away in here. So in this colony, this is an imported Buckfast F1 queen. The queen's marked white in there and she's got about 8 or 9 attendants with her. Nice plug of fondant on that side and then a nice little cage over here that you can open up to introduce your queen. Now the question I get asked quite a lot with this one is, should you introduce the queen as she is or should you introduce her with the attendants in the cage? And I always say, Don't mess around trying to get the queen out. Just introduce it with the attendants in the cage, make sure the colony's hopelessly queenless, and then just don't open the tab until you're 100% sure that she's hopelessly queenless. And then you can open the tab and then leave them for a week. Really, really easy to get them to ball that queen. If you start opening them up and faffing around, once you've got them even to hopelessly queenless, they can ball her. So as soon as you open that tab, Don't go in. One week later, hopefully you'll go in, you'll find eggs. So yeah, that's it. I'm going to go around, I'm going to put some of these queens in my colonies now, make some splits. I just wanted to do a quick video though showing how easy it is to get queens through the post, talk to you about some of the uses of them as well. So the companies that I would recommend: Honeyfields Bee Farm, very good company, very reputable, very good operation. They're still supplying imported queens when a lot of the other ones are struggling. BS Honeybees, obviously everyone knows BS Honeybees, really good company, did a lot of work getting to the point where they could supply these queens on a, on a daily basis. Struggling a little bit with Brexit I think though, but everybody is at the moment, so hopefully in the next couple of years they'll sort all of the issues out. Seper Honeybees as well, very, very good quality honeybees coming in from there, good quality queens. And then the last one I'd like to say is Jed Marshall as well, really top quality queens coming out of Jed Marshall. So yeah, just wanted to do that video. Don't be put off by buying queens in the post, they are so easy to manage, really quick, and they're not that expensive as well. So the next phase with a posted queen is putting it into a nuc, and this is what we're covering on a separate video. I've just made up a 2-frame nuc, 2 frames of brood, put some stores in there, put some frames, empty drawn comb frames in there as well, loads of bees, no queen, and we're just going to introduce that queen now. It's really, really simple, great way to make increase And a really, really simple way to get good quality nucs into your apiary. So all we're going to do is take the queen cage that it comes in, leave the tab on, don't take that tab off yet, double-check that the queen's okay, and then you're going to wedge that between 2 brood frames nice and tight, and we're going to leave that for 7 days. We're going to come back, release the tab after 7 days, and then we'll do a further manipulation to make sure that queen's introduced. But I just wanted to show you as part of this video about posted queens how you actually get the queen from the cage into the colony, and it's a really, really easy way to do it. So it's as simple as that. The queen has been introduced, she's safe still in her cage, and we're going to come back in a week or so and we're going to release her after we've checked there's no cells and after we've checked that she's hopelessly queenless. So that's it. Thanks for watching. As always, please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time.