In this instructional video, the presenter walks through a systematic approach to managing breeder queen colonies at a newly established apiary with the goal of extending queen lifespan to four‑six years. The session begins with the relocation of last year’s island‑mated and artificially inseminated queens (including Lutz Eggert Buckfast stock) to a shaded, low‑traffic site. The presenter explains the biological limit of queen semen reserves and warns against high‑output techniques that accelerate queen senescence. The core management strategy centers on deliberately keeping colonies small (3‑4 frame splits) by removing not only brood and eggs but also the adult bees attached to those frames, then establishing the split at a secondary apiary. This early‑season split, performed when colonies reach about four frames, limits egg production and curtails colony expansion for the rest of the year. Additional tactics include minimal supplemental feeding, frequent (2‑7 day) inspections to gauge food stores, and careful winter buildup only when necessary. Visual inspection of frames (e.g., dandelion‑infused wax, brood patterns) is used to confirm colony health and growth rate. The presenter also highlights the calm temperament of the Lutz Eggert queens and teases future collaborations. The video concludes with a call‑to‑action for a 14‑day online beekeeping course.
Chapters
Today I'm going to show you how to look after your breeder queens. So we are at a brand new apiary location, which is kind of the same apiary as normal, but just a different site. We thought we'd get out of the sun underneath this beautiful tree here, and I really do like the green light behind. But what I have done is I've brought in all of last year's either artificially inseminated or island mated queens just into a row up here in the apiary, because I want to be close by to them to be able to manage them properly. Now these aren't breeder queens yet. I will take some grafts from them and I'll be testing out the offspring next year. Our oldest breeder queen we've got is coming into her 6th year, and that is how long the queens can last when you treat them like this. All of the tips I'm going to show you in the video today are aimed at prolonging the life of your queen. So when a queen goes out and gets mated, she's inseminated by up to 20 drones. She takes on a finite amount of semen, and once that semen runs out, she will turn into a droneland queen and she will Now if you do techniques like the Demarais or anything to turbocharge that queen and get her to lay more, she's going to die much younger. You can flip that round and you can set yourself up with colonies as small as this, with really good quality island-mated or artificially inseminated queens, and just keep them in this really small stasis where they don't get that big. You're not running through the reserve of eggs. And then as long as you know how to look after your queens and look after your bees and set them up for winter and allow them to expand at the right times of the year when they need to produce the bees to overwinter, then you can get your breeder queens to live for 4, 5, even 6 years long. It does get super confusing when they get older than 5 years though, because the same color convention comes back around again. So you've got same blue queens and same white queens that we've got kind of this year and last year, but the tips for keeping them small are very, very simple. And some of the mistakes that I made on some of my earlier breeder queens was to take away frames of brood and take away frames of eggs and just give the bees back foundation thinking, well, that's going to set them right back. And it did the opposite because I left all of the bees in there. So the first thing you'll probably notice about this colony here, which is quite small because it's the beginning of the year and we just moved it away to a new apiary, but it's also deliberately kept at this size. Now I'll show you inside the frames in a little bit, but the idea here is not to expand the colony out and then take out frames of brood. I thought it'd be a good sustainable brood factory, but what it was doing is it was making the queens go faster than I wanted them to go, probably faster than they would even go in reality. So I found a much more efficient way of doing it now, which is instead of just taking the frames of brood out, taking the frames of eggs out, you have to take out the frames of bees as well. So we've got a 3-frame split here. Imagine it goes up to a 5 or a 6-frame split. What I do at that point is I just take another split out. I'll take 3 full frames of brood, the eggs, the stores, and all of the bees that are on it and just go and take it off to another apiary and leave behind one of these little mini colonies like this again. The only exception is the back end of the year where you build them back up again to full strength because they do need quite a lot of bees to get through the winter. So you can see we've got empty frames of foundation there, and that one's completely empty as well. And how you know if a little colony like this is working or liking the configuration or even able just to cope with it is that the frame that you put next to that brood nest, your first frame of foundation, When you go back in, you want to see it like this. You want to see the bees drawing it out and making use of that space, which is exactly what we've got here. So then if I flip that round, you can see on the other side we've got foundation, which is nice. These have only been up here for about a week now. This is nice slow growth. So normally what I would do in this situation here, the frame came out like that, I'd say, well, let's spin it round to turbocharge that growth and get the queen to expand. But here I don't want to do that. I want to do the complete opposite, which is just place it back exactly in the configuration that it came in. And move on to the next frame. So these queens here are from Lutz Eggert. They went off to his beautiful island that I was supposed to be going to this year and had to cancel my plans unfortunately, but I will be back there hopefully in 2027. Zane is most excited about that one as well. But this is a beautiful frame, look at that. These are just the calmest bees going. Now Zane, you got some experience of beekeeping now, you got your My First Nuc over there. What do you think about these ones? Can you see like the difference? Next level. Yeah, it's next level, isn't it? It's like nothing is going to disturb them from just doing what they need to do. So nice frame there, good amount of stores on there. You can see it's not a big massive colony at this point in the year. Let's see if we can find that queen. So here she is, quite a dark Buckfast line, this one. But I just love how calm these bees are, and I have an agreement with Lutz to say we're going to work together to get them even calmer than this. And he said, oh yeah, my bees aren't that calm. And I said, well, they're pretty chilled out, Lutz, I have to say. And I've had experience of Lutz's queens for about 5 or 6 years now, so I've been using them for a long, long time. And I do have a special surprise later on for you in the year about Lutz's queen, so watch this space. So I'm going to place the queen frame back in there and I'll show you the final frame. So the final frame, I thought it was going to have a little bit more stores on that because it's quite a heavy frame, but it is another beautiful dandelion-infused frame, but it is full of brood. Look at that brood there, Zane. So good to see a decent amount of stores up at the top, but that is mostly brood on that side, and then we've got a good amount of eggs on this side here as well. I love seeing the early season dandelion-infused wax frames like that. There is nothing else quite like it. So I'm going to put that all back together again, and what am I going to do to keep this colony as small as I can possibly keep it? So one thing that I'll do is not feed it as much as other colonies. I'll do more regular inspections, which means that I can push the colony a little bit further when it comes to making sure they have enough food. If I'm doing 7-day inspections, I've got to make sure the colony has X amount. If I'm coming back in and doing 2-day inspections on these colonies here, I can leave them with a little bit less food, which means that you get this natural suppression of growth. If you just constantly feed colonies like this when you think there's going to be a period of no nectar coming in, you're just going to get them expanding out of the box way too quick. So do everything you possibly can to not feed, increase your inspection regime to make sure that you can reduce the amount of stores that they need from inspection to inspection, and then just have a plan in mind. You are going to have to take a split out of here. It's the only way to keep the numbers down. You're going to take the brood out, you're going to take the bees that are on the brood, and it is much, much easier to do that early on in the season just by coming in when a colony's just made it across, say, to the 4th frame. Come along and split that colony then, as soon as they get to 4 frames. Now this only works in spring, but you can turn a 4-frame split like that— if you've got 2 frames of brood, 2 frames of stores— you you can just split them 50/50, but you do have to take one of the splits to a new apiary site. Now, just doing that once early on in the season is probably gonna be enough to limit her to the box throughout the entire year. You might have to do it again. Whereas if you let them build up into full-size huge colonies and then start splitting things out, it can become really, really challenging and you lose track of the amount of eggs that the queen is laying. And if you come across a brilliant queen, when you get to year 4, 5, and 6 and you've got loads of experience as to how their offspring perform across Thousands of queens, then you think back to what you're doing at the early stages and you wish that you put the effort in now to limit the amount of eggs that the queen lays, especially the expensive breeder queens. So that's pretty much it. Limit your feeding, increase your inspection regime, and take preemptive splits out earlier on in the season, and just keep a really close eye on them. If you're pushing the boundaries like that and not leaving them quite enough food, do remember it's on you as the beekeeper to make sure they are well fed. So only do that if you know exactly what you're doing and you're confident judging the amount of food they need to the next inspection. Now, if you want to learn more tips and guidance like that, ways to get the very best out of your bees, check out our online course, 14-Day Beekeeper, that will turn you from a beginner to a competent beekeeper in just 2 weeks.
