In this instructional video, beekeeper Laurence Edwards showcases two pure, artificially inseminated breeder queens he received from Carl Lockyer. He explains why he collects such queens— to overwinter them and later graft F1 daughters for high‑quality UK‑mated queens and improved local drone stock. Edwards details the two genetic lines: a back‑crossed 125 line originally used by Peter Little, and a pure Ligustica line back‑crossed with the same 125 line. He walks through his requeening process, describing colony setup, double‑brood wintering, Apivar treatment, and the day‑by‑day behavior of nurse bees toward the new queen, emphasizing that early aggression is normal and not a predictor of success. He notes the queen’s appearance, laying pattern, and successful mating. Finally, Edwards outlines his broader breeding program, including a planned competition among his diverse queen collection to identify the best genetics for future sales and drone improvement.
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I've been going absolutely wild this year. I have bought so many pure, call them F0 if you want, artificially inseminated breeder queens. In this video, I'm going to show you my latest 2 breeder queens from Carl Lockyer. So massive thanks to Carl for sending me these queens. I'm going to overwinter them here and I'm going to put them to good use next year grafting from the mothers to give myself amazing quality UK-mated daughters. I've got 2 lines I'm going to show you today. First one is a 125 line that was used by Peter Little, backcrossed into itself. I'm really interested to see how that one gets on. And then the second one is a pure Lagustica line backcrossed with that same 125 line from Peter Little. Amazing to see that Peter's name lives on and people are continuing to maintain the same genetics that Peter used while he was rearing his queens. I'm so excited to see how they're going to get on alongside all of the other pure queens that I've got at the moment. I've been amassing an amazing collection of different breeder queens, different pure artificially inseminated queens, different island-mated queens, lots of different genetics. I'm going to take daughters from all of them next year and we'll do some sort of crazy competition to see which one is the best. So I'm halfway through an introduction at the moment. I've taken out the F1 Buckfast queen, that's on its way to someone else. I've introduced the artificially inseminated queens and I'm just waiting to get to the point where we get to day 8 where I can knock down all of the cells, open the tab, and then I'll leave the queens to do a slow introduction. Today's video though, I'll pop my bee suit on, I'll get inside one of the colonies, I'll show you the queen and talk to you a little bit about why I think the daughters are going to be fantastic. So this is the colony that I'm requeening with my My artificially inseminated queen from Carl. A couple of days into the requeening at the moment, so all I'm going to do, just going to open the colony up, pop out the cage, show you the queen. It's a little bit of a miserable day here today, first day in ages that it's been like 15 or 16 degrees. Not a huge amount of activity from the bees going and flying, so they might be a little bit grumpy. We'll get inside though, take a look, see how they're getting on. So there's my colony of bees, these ones here sitting on a double brood configuration. I generally try and condense my colonies down, but sometimes you just need to give them a little bit more space. These ones here have put themselves in vertical format and ignored some of those frames over there, so I'm leaving them on double brood over winter. You can see I got my Apivar strips in nice and early as well. Let's get that queen out now and see how she's getting on. So there she is, this is the artificially inseminated backcross 125 line, and check out the bees' behaviour to her. I find this very interesting. I hear people talk about it a lot saying, oh, that's nice behaviour, or, oh, that's bad behaviour. You know what, I don't think it really means anything. I've seen really nice, kind, gentle behavior, and then they kill the queen. And I've seen horrible, aggressive behavior through the cage. They're hopeless to queenness and they accept her. So I wouldn't read into this at all. If you wanted to have a look at it and say, what kind of behavior is that? I would say, yeah, that's probably not the best behavior, really swamping them. That's kind of what you'd expect though on day 2 of a requeening, in that they're still thinking, we want ourselves to win, we're going to kill this queen inside. So as I said, wouldn't read too much into that. As long as you pop the cage on day 8 when the colony is hopelessly queenless, no issues whatsoever. And in the meantime, the nurse bees will have no other choice but to feed her through the cage. They don't know any better, they just see a queen and they want to feed her. So this could be nurse bees rushing in to feed her, could be bees trying to get in there to kill her, more than likely going to be a mixture of the two. So there's my queen, she's a yellow queen, 2022, got her number disc on. She's not very old, this one, but she's old enough to have got some pheromone. She started laying, nice pattern. The mating's gone well. I think she looks really nice. Like the color of her. So, so excited to see how this line turns out. So there we go, another addition to the ever-expanding crew of breeder queens. The more breeder queens I get, the more I can produce good quality F1 daughters, which I can use to sell to people in the UK, but I can also use as drone mothers to boost the good quality drones in my local area. This one here, I'm so excited about.
