🐝 Step by Step From Larva to Laying Queen - Raising Mated Queen Bees In Malta 🇲🇹

Today I'm in Gozo in Malta and I'm with Melitta Bees and they're going to show me how they rear their queen bees. This is a video not to be missed. So the way they do things at Melitta Bees is they use a starter finisher system, and if I just go over here, I'll show you exactly how it's developed and how it works. So it looks like that's 2 beehives together, but it's not. This is Just a single box all the way along the bottom there, and then it's kind of separated at the top, and then they have queen excluders that go down like that. So it's kind of done in a vertical fashion. So all of the queen rearing and the grafting and the starting and the finishing is done all within this central box down here. Look at the size of those frames. Standard frame they use here is a Dadant frame. And just look at how nice and calm those bees are. But look at the amazing brood pattern as well. Beautiful brood pattern. So this is Michaela. She is the wife of Amano, and she is responsible for all of the queen rearing grafting that goes on in the island of Gozo. So you can see drone production already well underway here. All of this side over here, lots and lots of drone brood, tons of pollen flooding in as well. And what Michaela is doing here is she is setting up the colony to get them ready to accept the first round of grafts. So this method here is a queen right method. The real thing that she's looking for here is open brood. So if we look at this frame down here, you'll see lots of nice capped brood. Michaela wants the opposite of that. She wants nice young brood, nice open larva, which means it's going to attract all of the young nurse bees from over here in this part of the hive over there to that main part where all the action takes place. You've got to remember, the key to good quality queens is lots and lots of young bees and lots and lots of food, carbohydrate, but most importantly, lots of protein. In the form of pollen, and then once you get that mix of ingredients, all you need to do is trick the colony into thinking they haven't got a queen, and they will take those very, very young larva. They'll combine it with the the bee bread that's coming in to raise really nice prolific royal jelly filled queen cells. So just to show you that setup there at the top, you've got the queen excluder, but then going further down, you can see that it's a solid wall, and then that coincides with that bar up. There, and then that is how they trick the bees in this part of the colony to think that they are queenless. It's quite crazy using such big frames, similar to the 14 by 12, but probably a little bit bigger even than a 14 by 12. Very, very heavy frame. But look how nice and calm these bees are. You can see why we've got the calmest bees in the UK being bred by these people. Okay, we found the queen. There we go. All right, let's put this back. You know, it's good for to put there. So Oh, maybe not. Wait, wait. Gotta follow, gotta follow the orders. So what Michaela was doing there, shaking off all of the young bees into this part of the split over here. As we said, the idea for that middle part of the split, trick them that there is no queen. Lots and lots of young bees, feed them lots of protein in the form of pollen, and then the bees will do the rest. I'm just checking it's the right system. So on here we've got the queen. So see if you can spot the queen on there. So she is right in the middle of the frame, but we're going to put her back in because this is a queen-right system in this double setup starter finisher. So Michaela there is putting the queen as far away as possible, even by turning that frame around from that compartment that we're going to try and make queenless now. So you can see what's happened there is Michaela's put the queen back down into this box. The queen excluder's gone on, and then that is just a super of honey. So new frames, only queenless. How long ago did these foundations go in? One week. One week. So kind of last week of Feb, first week of March. Can we just take out that frame, see what they've done? There we go. So you can see the bees are drawing out those frames and they're storing nectar. A real prerequisite of good queen rearing is a very, very strong flow. And you can either do that through having a natural flow or you can do it through feeding your bees. At the moment in Malta, beautiful strong flow, so no feeding is required. At this point. So really good way to show now exactly what's going on in here. This part here, these 5 frames or 6 frames when the other one goes in, this is going to be the queenless portion. This is the system, this is the method to fool the bees down here to think that they do not have a queen. So what Michaela previously did is went into here, took out any kind of nice capped brood. You don't really want capped brood in here, it's not giving you anything. So she's taken out the capped brood, put it back over here, and then she's going to go through these frames here. Find a really nice uncapped piece of brood, so some young brood and larva, and place that down here. That will draw all of the young bees from here through over to here. But also what she will do is chuck in lots and lots of nice young bees into here. So that's a really important consideration there. This is a two queen system: one queen on that side, queenless; one queen on that side. So two separate genetics kind of merging together in the middle. So hopefully you can see the queen there on the middle of that frame. Beautiful Italian Lagustica queen. And again, she needs to go onto the opposite side of the hive. So that's a really important point there, that frame that was just taken out was completely, or basically half full with eggs. But what they want is a frame that is completely full, not so much with eggs, but larvae that are just opening up, something that is going to attract those young bees through and mean that you can get as many young bees into this section here as possible. So Michaela just shaking off all the bees off that frame there. What was really noticeable to me on that frame is just how many Bees were on it. Lots more bees in here, young bees, than there is over here because they've all been shaken in and that's what they want. Now the reason that young bees are important is they are the ones that produce the royal jelly, and it's the queen cells, the young larvae in those queen cells, they need to be fed copious amounts of royal jelly so that they transform into a queen as opposed to just a worker bee. So you can see just how gentle these bees are, but also how carefully Michaela is kind of rearranging those frames. That is the key to management. Really nice, gentle handling. So you can see the queen. Michaela's just picked the queen up by the wing and put it back in there. So that's the best frame in that box there. You can see if I kind of get close in, hopefully lots and lots of eggs, preferably would have kind of emerged into some larva, but this would do for the time being. So that's the setup here. This frame here, very, very young larva. This frame here, very, very young larva. This one grafting frame. This one grafting frame. Okay, so what Mano is saying is, like I said, when the weather's good, They don't need to do it, but they'll always start it off with a little bit of— is it 1:1 syrup? Just sugar syrup? Ah, is 250 millilitres. Okay, so a tiny amount as well, just 250 millilitres, just to get them going. If the weather is better like yesterday, it's necessary to feed them. Yeah, yeah. Okay, cool. So there you go. That's a really important one. You need to leave the bees in this central compartment here in order to make them think that they do not have a queen. So really important. Wait 2 or 3 hours and then we're going to go back and we're going to insert the larva into these boxes down here. So next step of the process is you need to take the young larva from the beehive, from the selected breeder queen that you've chosen, and place it into the plastic queen cell cups. So Michaela has already identified this morning the frames that she would like to graft from, and we're just going to take a look inside now and see how those bees are getting on, and more importantly, to see the exact size of larva that you're looking for to get the very Best queens. Michaela is just brushing all of the bees off there, and you can see Michaela she's brushing bees off there. I'm standing right next to her, and the bees are not doing anything. And that is because they are the very best of the best breeder queen in there. Pure Buckfast breeder queen to take those larvae from and use them for grafting. So that area up there is where Michaela is going to take the young larvae from. So it's always a little bit difficult to show this on camera, but if you can see. I'll get as close up as I can. That little top section there, that is where Michaela is going to take all of those young larvae from. And with this being a huge Dadant frame like that, there is plenty of larvae in there in order to make sure that she can complete all the bars. So a lovely little setup there, nice and dark, but with a light on so that Michaela can see right in and see exactly what is going on. Royal jelly mixed with water and colloidal silver. And Michaela is using the fixed kind of German-style Lava tool there, grafting tool. And you can see just how quick Michaela is at getting them out. And look how small they are. That is all in the skill there. So what Michaela is saying there is that you should be picking the very smallest larva that you possibly can, and you ideally want to get them about 6 hours after the egg has hatched, which is roughly around day 4 after the queen has laid that egg. So that royal jelly and water mix is, is quite crucial. Like, I normally just use water just to kind of put something on the bottom of the cell in order to float the larva on means that it's much kind of easier for the larva to slide off the grafting tool, which means that you're not doing that much damage to it. But you can, you can really tell here, Michaela is an expert in this. She's way quicker than I am, and she is going for the absolute smallest larva that you can possibly get. So what you're seeing in there is some eggs and some very, very young larva, absolutely tiny ones there. So it is now 7 days later after we added in those bars full of larvae, and we're going to check if we've had a good acceptance and see how many queen cells we've got. That's the beauty of this system, because you only have to open the beehive once per week. You open it up, you take out your queen cells, you put them into the incubator, And then you go straight away and graft a new bar into that box. There's a little bit of shuffling of brood and they need to add more young bees if it needs topping up, but it's a really nice, fully contained system that produces some very nice queen cells. So before we do that, really good opportunity to show you what I was talking about before. So you've got this section here with the queen excluder that allows bees but no queens to kind of pass through. And then if I zoom down further, what you can see then is you've got a solid board that doesn't allow anything through. When those queen cell frames are placed in, they block up this queen excluder setting here, or at least reduce the transmission of pheromone from the queen over there to the queenless part of the hive. And then that is what makes all of these young bees turn those larva into queen cells. So Michaela's gonna open it up now, 7 days later. Let's get inside and see how those queen cells are looking. So you can see there, the bees, there's no let-off from the bees. They are completely covering those frames still. Even though they're fully capped now, Michaela just takes them off one by one, gently rests them on the side, and then we need to remove all of those bees, and she just removes those bees with a bee brush. You see those bees coming off now, and then there's going to be a reveal of some beautiful queen cells underneath. Very, very nice. So only kind of like one or two missed on there. Very good acceptance rate. There's literally only one, I think, in the middle that's gone. Nice big healthy chunky queen cells. Just getting the last of those off. Maybe 2 removed from the middle there. Or one, no. Okay, let's have a look. So 2 that are joined together, they should be okay. And then you've got the one missing on the edge and one there. That is a really good success rate. I'd be happy with that every single time. And then similar on that frame there. These are nice deep cups as well, which result in very, very good quality queens. So then we'll follow Amano in here. They go straight out from the hive, and you got to be quick here, take them past the fridge, but they are going into the incubator. So these queens are not yet fully formed. It's only day 11 of the 17-day process. A little bit dark in here. So they go into the incubator. They're kept at, I think it was 35.4. They keep it on in here. I just boost that ISO up a little bit there or boost it down just so you can see what's going on in here. And then the incubator is designed just to hold those bars there. And then we close it up very quickly because we want to make sure it's warm. All done. So let's show you exactly how that works now. Amano's going to get another 96 grafted cells. I'll show you inside this colony. I'll show you the pollen frames. I'll show you the brood frames. And then we'll get those cells in, and fingers crossed we get some really good successful introductions. So just to show you it again, that part is queen right, that part is queen right. This little bit in the middle, there is a divider down there and a divider down there that means that the queens can't get through, but none of the bees can get through. It is a completely solid board that goes in, which means that this bit in the middle stuffed full of bees and is hopelessly queenless. You just need to wait a few hours for the bees to realise that before you put those cells in. So 24 hours later, I'm back at the starter finisher and we're going to take a look inside and see what the acceptance is like for the larvae that were grafted 24 hours before. So you can see Mikaela taking off the bars there, a really gentle shake, and then she puts them over there in the shade. We'll get them all off and then we'll take a look. So Michaela just removing the ones that hadn't taken. Just 3 on that bar. You can see just how quickly they've drawn them out though. That shows that the conditions for raising queens is very, very good. So what you're looking for here is the cells to start to be drawn down like that. All of those there are looking fantastic. So once Michaela's removed all of the duds, and there was only I think 3 or 4, On that whole frame there. Then they go back in, and as it's a starter finisher, they will stay there for another 6 days now, and they'll be removed on day 11 of the process. Okay, next step in the process is we need to collect lots of young nurse bees to go into the mating nucs. Easiest way of doing that is going into the supers and shaking the bees out from the supers. That means you're going to get the majority of young bees up in the supers. And not that many drones. If Amano can't get all of them from the supers, then he will go down to the brood nest, isolate the queen, and shake off some young bees off some open frames of brood. But we will try and get as many as we can from the supers. So what Amano's doing there is he's searching all of these colonies to find supers that are nice and full of bees. And then when he finds one that's full of bees, he puffs a little bit of smoke in there. And then leaves the roof ajar. And what that does is it draws up as many bees as possible into the super and just makes his collection loads and loads easier. So you see he's done it there, just left that crack, gave them a tiny little puff of smoke. So the bees are set up here on a double brood configuration, pollen trap in situ. And then along here you can see you've got a queen excluder. So then upstairs, that's the honey super, and that is where all of the young bees are going to be hanging out, at least the majority of them. So what Amano is saying is when he puffs the smoke through the entrance, if there's a gap at the top, the smoke will naturally want to release out there, but it will drive the bees up and kind of through into that super where he can collect more bees. So a good way of kind of being very, very efficient, I guess. So you can see there, Amano really smoking them, and I mean heavy smoking. You think that's like 20 puffs? There's 2 entrances there, so 20 puffs or so in each entrance. To really drive all of those bees upwards. So Amano closes this bottom entrance, so these stay in permanently. The bees can't actually get in through here, but there's a little bit of ventilation at the bottom. They all just come through the pollen trap, which is generally open if they're not collecting pollen. Lots of nice pollen coming in here though. Look at these bees chilling out up here. Beautiful colony of bees. So what Amano says is he kind of goes down the number of smokes or puffs of the smoke each time. So he wants to smoke them all 3 times. He starts off doing 12 puffs per entrance. There's 2 entrances, although one of them's closed. So the first round is 24 puffs, second round is 12 puffs, final round is 6 puffs, and then he might do a 4th round of 3 puffs. Basically, the amount of smoke going in each time is reduced. And he says this is a brilliant system to drive as many bees upwards into the supers as possible. And that is where you want to take your bees from, because we're putting bees here into the mating nucs. The absolute last thing that you want to do is put any queens in there, any mated queens or any virgin queens. Having that queen excluder in between and driving the bees up through the queen excluder means that you're pretty much guaranteed to not get any queens or any virgin queens through into the supers, which means that they will not end up into your mating boxes. If you put a queen cell into a mating box and there is A virgin in there or a queen in there, obviously they are just going to kind of completely ignore it or take it down or kill it. So this is a very, very important step in the process, getting the right age of young bee with no queens into the box in the correct quantity in order to take care of that virgin queen once she finally emerges. So what Mano's doing there is putting some water on there. You say otherwise the bees go down too fast, so it's just to slow them down a little bit. I've not even introduced this device yet. So this is the bee collector contraption. With a big bang. So metal galvanised, bit of rust in the middle, but you can see it just feeds it all down there into a big box full of bees. So what Amano's saying there is that normally they have like a motorised aid for getting them in, but all Amano's going to do there is a big tap, all of the bees go down, and just look how many bees came out of that super there. Absolutely crazy amounts. You've got like a good 2 inches of bees there. That is wild. So Amano first takes the roof, lots of bees up on the roof. Big tap down, then you can see look at all of those bees up in the super now. So picks the super straight up. Sun's come out just for it. Big tap, and watch at the bottom there all of those bees coming down. So Mano's just saying there two full supers of bees is a standard package, which is about three pounds, so one and a half kilos of bees. And you can look at it there. That is that is a full package of bees already. It really doesn't take that much in order to Kind of fill up that box there. So Mano's saying we need 7 kilos, so maybe kind of 14 supers. And if we can't get them out the supers, we will go searching for them downstairs in the brood boxes. So you can see it's quite disruptive, that, but the bees are not that fussed, to be honest. They're not stinging us, they're not doing anything like that. They're just kind of getting on with it. Nice young calm bees. But take a look at all the bees in that box there. They're trying to get out, but they can't really work it out. A few will get out, But the majority will stay put. So you can see all the bees there downstairs in that box, a few coming out, but not that many. Let's get on with another super. So a box full to the brim with bees. We're going to go now and put them into some mating nucs. So Amano is just cleaning the box there of all bees with some lovely soft wild fennel. The bees without the queen attract the drones, and you can see all the drones trying to Cluster in there. Yeah, loads of drones. And Amano's just cleaning all of those off with some wild fennel. I love it. No bee brushes here. Just goes and picks some fennel. And you can see inside there, the bees are very, very happy. But here is the most important part of this process. You have to keep the bees nice and cool. So he's constantly spraying them with water to make sure that they're not getting stressed out at all. And he says he can read the behavior of the bees. So inside, you don't want to see them running around going crazy. You obviously don't want to see them stacked up, you just want to see nice slow movement inside like that, and then that means that the bees are very, very happy and content in being in there and in perfect health for the next step of the process. So really wetting them down now, and then what the bees do is they cluster up at the top. That is what you want to see. If you left them there for a few hours, you'd have all of the bees clustered up at the top and absolutely none at the bottom. If you've got a big pile of bees at the bottom, they are almost certainly dead. dead. Very, very hard to overdo the water, but little and often is best. But these 2 packages now are ready to go into the mini mating nucs. We're going to take them back to the warehouse and get everything sorted. So what Mano is doing here is opening up all of the used Apidae. You open them up from the bottom, and that is the best way to put the bees in. Never like to see bees going in from the top. It doesn't work. It's not good for the bees. But you can see we've got all of those boxes Open up from the bottom now. So this frame over here, they're taking down maybe like 80% of that one. The one over here, probably halfway. And then the final frame, they leave it completely fully drawn out. Reason for that is to ensure that there is sufficient volume to take all of the bees. You are going to see a huge amount of bees going in here. So this is what the queen cells look like once they are ripe, 11 days old. And they are going into these cell protectors. So the cell protectors are there to stop the bees ripping down and taking down those cells. Doesn't give them the option to do it. So then they are placed back over here into the incubator. Obviously really important to keep your queen cells at the exact right temperature. And I think they've got it here kind of like 35, 36. Italian queen. So another batch in there for some Italian queens. See the temperature there, 35.4 it's set at. So Nicola's doing some stretching. You'll see now it is pitch black in here. The camera's The camera is quite good. It makes it look lighter than it is, but it's very, very dark in here now. And the reason for that is just to keep the bees nice and calm, stop them flying up. The bees are much more relaxed when it's nice and dark inside. So the plan is to get the bees in here over into these nucleus set up here. So they take a full scoop of bees that weighs about 120 grams, and then that is the perfect size to go into these. So first thing you need to do, Amano, is soaking the bees. This just means that they don't fly and it's much easier to control them and much easier to dose them correctly. So they're soaking the bees as they come out into that bucket there, and that just makes it much, much easier for them to get the scoop in without damaging those bees. You really do need to get them nice and wet. You just saw a couple fly through there, and what that means is that they'll fly away from where we're working. They'll fly to the lights Which makes this process so much easier. So you'll see Amano working now, proper professional. He is going to do this so quick, isn't he? But what you have to do, you have to be very quick. You have to get the bees in quick, and then you have to close the lid super, super fast, else all of the bees just fly out. So there we go, one colony in, 120 grams worth of bees. Next one's in, closed up. You get the idea here, don't you? This is a 2-person job. You never want to do this on your own. And let's have a look at those bees going in there now. Big fresh clump of bees, closed up straight away. So how many do you do normally at a time with these? So they have different numbers in different sites. In Malta, they'll do about 200 of these per day. They've got a site in Italy as well where they do 500 per day. So they'll go out, they'll collect the bees, they've got all of the queen cells, 500 of these boxes go out each and Every single day, and the process is just repeated again and again and again. Lots and lots of bees going in here. So you can see all of the ones that are done now, they're closed up and over there, and then in the background, all of the ones that need to be done. So immediately after the bees go in, the lights come back on and those ripe queen cells go into the Apideas. This one here is a one-person job, as you'll see. Michaela takes it off, you can see all of the bees inside, already got fondant in. The queen cell goes in. Lid back on, and then they are ready to go into refrigeration. Now, that refrigeration, I know I go on about it, and I've said it a number of times in this video, but it is a very, very important point. If you were to take this nuc here now and take it out and put it out into an apiary, all of the bees would fly away, and the virgin queen would not live and would not be able to go out and mate. By closing them up like this, these boxes are completely sealed up now, no way for the bees to get out. And putting them into cold storage, it seems to trick the bees Into wanting to stay into that little mini mating nuc. And that is what you want them to do. You need the correct amount of bees, the correct type of bees, the right queen cell, and you need them to stay put within that nuc. The refrigeration does that, minimum of 24 hours, but Melitta bees use it as 48 hours. And then you can see the results later on in this video. The bees do stay put, and it means that you have no issues with absconding. But just look at the work ethic here. This is brilliant. Cell after cell after cell. Super, super quick. Absolutely love it. So it is super, super important that the bees do not overheat, either in transit to go into the mating nucs or whilst they're in the mating nucs. And the best way of knowing if they're overheating is by listening to them. So that gentle roar that you can hear there is a good sign. It shows that the bees are like fanning their wings, trying to get themselves dry. But then as the pitch of that goes up, or even worse, goes completely silent, it means they are dead. So it's a race against the clock here to get these bees into the boxes and into that big massive refrigerator that you're going to see in a second. So they are experts. I'm amazed at just how quick they do it. It's like a military operation, really, really well organized and well managed. And it's just nice to know that they've got this mega, mega fridge that they can put them in. And then as soon as you put them in the fridge, they just calm right down. Everything slows down. There's no stress. The bees are very, very happy. They cluster up, basically like going into a winter cluster. If you ever opened up a colony in winter and you see them and they don't move a huge amount, do they? They're just there preserving their energy. That is what the refrigerator does. It keeps the bees in optimum condition in order for them to go out and to allow those queens to get mated. So then, final step of the process, all of the nucs Nucs are stacked up onto this pallet here, ready to go into the fridge, which is just next door. So the final nucs are going on there now, onto the pallet, stacked 3 high, and I can just hear that roar getting louder and louder and louder. But you will get that roar. There is a lot of bees in these mating nucs, and I've seen people do it before where they don't put enough bees in there, and this is the reason that they cut out some of those frames. You effectively cut out about 50% of the surface area of those frames. In order to ensure that you can get enough bees in here. If you don't put enough bees in here, you're just not going to get them to cluster up. They don't think that they're a colony, they think that they're just kind of a selection of bees, and they're going to go off and find a proper beehive. So what you're seeing in here, we are in an absolutely huge refrigerator here. The nucs, the poly nucs, the little Apidaias, they're set up, all of the bees are put in, they add in a nice ripe queen cell that's going to emerge within the next kind of like 12 to 24 hours, and then they bring them in here to this really cold storage. So if I go down and have a look inside one of them without properly opening it up, so what you will see in here now is lots and lots of bees. So queen cell there, queen cell goes in, the virgin queen will have emerged in there now, and you can see that the bees are on 3 frames. These are all going to be drawn out, and then over here you can see the bees are feeding. Now the reason they need to come into the refrigeration first is that if you were just to kind of like populate that box there, put all of the bees in, put the queen cell in, and go and take that out into the apiary, what would happen is you'd get, I don't know, 500 bees in this box, 60 bees in this box, 800 bees in this box, this box is empty, this one's got 7,000 bees in. You get the point. But if you do this cold storage in between, then they get really nicely settled to their new home. And every single bee that is in there when I, when they take them out to the apiary for the matings will remain in there. So you'll get 500 bees, 500 bees, 500 bees, 500 bees, or however many bees are in these little mini nucs. You can replicate this in the UK if you want as well. The way that I would do it is you're just going to populate your Apidaires really late in the evening, leave them until the following morning before taking them out and putting them in your apiary. If you've got a cold store, even better. You can bring them in, nice cold room. And leave the bees for 24 hours. And you can see the bees are very, very happy in there. And then as soon as they get taken out, they will go out, they will fly, the virgin will mate, and you'll have some very, very amazing quality Buckfast queens for this batch here. But obviously Amano and the team here rear lots and lots of different types of queen. So all of the queens are loaded out on this pallet here, taken out onto the pickup truck, wonderful old B vehicle this one, and believe it or not, this is the weather in Malta. Brought the lovely North Wales weather here. It is raining, drizzle, 15 degrees Celsius, and then you can see all of those little apidaias going out onto the back of the pickup truck, ready to go out. Normally they would do this at nighttime, so the bees kind of have no choice other than to stay in the apidaias. But it is raining; it is miserable. So we're doing this a little bit earlier today. It's about half. 5 o'clock here in Malta at the moment. We're gonna go out and release these nucs into their homes now. So you really couldn't make it up, like I came to Malta and I brought the North Wales weather with me. It has been hammering it down today, absolutely hammering it down, but it's finally moving away. The weather's going and it is brightening up, and we are at one of the most beautiful apiary sites that I have ever seen. It's 110 nucs that are taking off here, so those little mini Apidea nucs that They put together, um, had the bees in cold storage for 48 hours, those ones, and they're bringing them out here now. And as I said, what they would have done previously is they would have waited until nightfall, brought them here in the middle of the night, opened up the entrances knowing that the bees aren't going to fly out— most of the bees aren't going to fly out in the middle of the night. And then the following day, all of the bees should have, or should have the ability to orientate back to that spot, and you won't get the drifting between the boxes. Because it's been so rainy here today and it's kind of like drizzling A little bit still now. They're just putting the boxes out a little bit earlier, going to open the entrances, and then the bees will go out and fly. So 110 boxes on the back there. You see Michaela sorting them out there, and then they go along this little track here. So they go— you can see the way they're putting them down in pairs, pairs of 2. You've got one entrance facing one way and then one entrance facing the other way, and then the next one along, they do the same thing. But they turn it around 90 degrees. So if you can kind of see the difference between those 2 there, the entrances are going that way and that way, and then on this one the entrances are going that way and that way. They just go on the floor and it goes on and on and on and on. Circle. Get up to 1,000 little mini mating nucs on this apiary in the height of the season. Michaela's saying hi there. And you know what, if I was a bee I would be incredibly happy here. This is glorious. Look at that. So do you use the pin to hold it open? The pin is to take open, keep open. Keep open. Yeah, because when the apidae is new, yeah, it just falls down. So you can see there, Mano and Michaela have opened up all of those apidae and the bees are coming out. And what we're seeing there is exactly what we want to see, which is Few bees coming out, just checking out what's going on, but they're not flying away. They're going to quickly realize it is nighttime. I'm shooting at 12,800 ISO, so it is very, very dark. Another bit of advice that Amano's given there is what you can see is— so originally it was set up like that, right next to each other, and what he said is no, you need to put a little angle like that so that you can't get the ants, um, kind of building colonies in between and then wrecking the polystyrene. But what he said is really important is that they need to touch there, because if you get a queen that kind of comes in in like this and there's a gap there, she could just kind of find her way through and then go into the other one, she'll potentially get killed. So that is a very, very good optimal setup that they use on all of their colonies. One entrance facing towards me, one entrance facing that way. And if we move on to the next one up here, you'll see, as I said before, changing it around 90 degrees. But again, that colony there, that little mini nuc showing exactly how these should be set up. Gap in the middle, entrances facing the wrong way, corners touching. Placed down at the correct time so the bees won't fly after they've been kept in cold storage. All that is left now for the virgins in this colony to go out and to mate. So you can see there, that's called a cell protector, and the reason that Amano uses that is to stop the bees kind of like burrowing in from the side. So that virgin will be running around in there now. Roof goes on, entrance is open. Sunny day tomorrow, the bees will be flying, and then a few days' time, once that queen's mature, she will go out and hopefully mate. So I'm sitting next to the mating nucs that we placed out last night, and you saw when Amano took out those cells that the queens had already emerged. He used a plastic queen cell protector. If you don't want to buy them, you can use a little bit of foil and just wrap the whole cell with foil apart from the little bottom bit where the queen's going to emerge, and that stops the bees kind of going in if they want to reject that queen and start eating into that cell. Good idea to protect your cells. We do it, we use foil on ours. But I think that's an important step to show. So Amano, very, very keen to always use cells, creates little mini mating nucs, puts the cells in just as they're ripe to emerge, puts them into cold storage. They either emerge in cold storage or very, very soon after. And he gets incredibly good success rate in terms of introduction. If you just try and run in a virgin or introduce a virgin, you're going to knock that percentage right down. So my recommendation and Amano's recommendation is to use ripe virgin queen cells and then make up your little splits. But I think the proof is in the pudding really, isn't it? So you can see the bees are coming in and out of that little mini mating nuc now. But what's more important is to see what is actually inside there. So I'm not going to take anything off. I am just going to quickly show you inside to show you that it has worked. So look in there. That is a mini nuc, an Apidea, full to the brim with bees. I'm going to put the lid straight back on because I don't want to disturb the virgin that's in there. But what's happened here is that the system has worked. All of the bees have stayed in there, all of the bees have stayed in there, and it goes all the way along the line. The bees stay in the nucs that they're supposed to stay in. So it's been about 36 hours since we placed these mini mating nucs out into their apiary, and Ermanno says within the first 4 days, before the queen has become sexually mature to go out and mate, you can actually go in and have a look, see if you can find a virgin and see what's on the frames. So let's go and do that now. So Mano was saying there that the bees don't tend to start building the wax until the queen is mated. But we've got such good weather in Malta at the moment, and because the ground's nice and wet because of that rain, all the plants are yielding lots of nectar and the bees are making good use of it and turning it into wax. So you can see all of those bees are still in there because they got kept in that refrigerator for 48 hours. We checked the queen cell and it has emerged. So there's definitely a virgin running around in this colony. see if we can find that virgin queen. So bees clustering up on that frame there, that means they're getting ready to build some wax. And there we go, there's our virgin queen. This is a VSH Buckfast. So if you're watching this, this could be your mated queen that you get from Black Mountain Honey in the UK. Beautiful queen, black tip on the bottom there. So the only thing left to do is to let nature take its course. That virgin queen in a couple of days will be sexually mature. She'll fly off, find a nice drone congregation area, She'll mate with up to 20 drones, and then she will return to the exact mini mating nuc that she exited from. And then the bees will start drawing out that wax. The queen will come back after a few days. She'll start laying eggs. Emano and the team then come in, check to see that it's nice capped worker brood to show that it's a successful mating. They're then collected. They go into the queen bank for 2 to 3 days, and then they're shipped off to customers all over the world. So we left Malta and Italy without seeing the ending of the queen rearing video. I'm going to finish it off here. The last time we left it, we'd gone inside, we'd checked that the virgin was there, and we said she is now sexually mature. In the next couple of days, she's going to go out, take a mating flight with a variety of drones, come back into the mini mating nuc, and then within a few days, she should start laying eggs. Once the queen has started laying eggs, those eggs will hatch out into larva. The bees will build them up, cap them over, they'll form pupa, and then out of that wax capping emerges young bees. Now, coming back to the UK, it's like coming back to Italy and Malta all over again. The weather has been spectacular. And the queen rearing attempts at all of my apiaries have just been phenomenal this year. So I find you can tell a huge amount just by taking the lids off mating nucs. First thing I always like to do is just take that cell out and have a look what's happened. Okay, they're starting to chew it down here. I'm pretty confident that the queen, virgin queen, has emerged from that cell. And there we go. I can already see I've got some eggs in here. So we do have a mated queen already inside this colony. So let's see if we can find her. So you can see there are a few misfires from the queen, couple of eggs in some of the cells, some of them off to the side. But then if you can see down under there, they're a lot better on that side. Outside, much neater. I think this is going to be a good queen. So found my queen. She is not difficult to see on this frame at all. Beautiful golden UK-mated F1 Buckfast queen. Whenever I put them back in, I always like for the queen to be not near the edge. I'm going to go inside, we'll have a look at the queen in this one and see what the brood pattern is like, see if that queen is ready for harvest. So what is noticeable on this one here is just there's loads more bees on it, and that is because there is capped brood, and that capped brood started to emerge. Now that is very, very good. And then you can see on the other side there, even where the cells have emerged, the queen has gone back around and laid another egg into them that quick because she's just desperate to lay those eggs. Again, another sign of a successful mating. Let's have a look in there. So she is in that bottom corner there. See if I can angle it enough. So there we go. I've got her there and I'm just putting her back on that frame. The queen is back on the frame. She's just going around on the edge right there. Perfect. So that there is a really easy way just to get a few bees into a cage. So I've got maybe six to eight attendants in my cage there. Don't want any more than that. Definitely don't overpack the cage for this. So next job is marking the queen. I like to use a Toma pen, T-O-M-A. Really good oil-based pen should last a lot longer. So here is my queen. And this is how I mark her. I just pin her down and put a little blue blob on her back like that. See, now she is perfectly marked. Do be careful not to kill your bees with pens. You need to pump them until the paint comes out, wipe it off once, wipe it off twice, wipe it off 3 times, and don't push it down again. And then mark your queen. You shouldn't kill any of them if you do it like that. So I just wanted to show you a couple of different methods for getting the queen inside the cage. It's something that I know a lot of beginners do struggle with. That one there that I just did was dead simple. I've just come along with a brand new clean cage with fondant in. I take off the the plastic coating, I place everything over the bees and the queen, and I slide that plastic tab in, trying not to squish anything. That is not how I do it at Black Mountain Honey. Let me show you how I do it. So let me let this queen back out here so she can go back out on the frame. There we go, she's on the frame. So this is how I do it. I take the queen and I just place her in a cage that's already got bees in like that. As always with beekeeping, so many different ways to do things. Trying to give you a couple of different options there if you need to get that queen in. I like to pre-prepare all of the cages with bees, come along and do my harvest, and I've already got 30 or 40 cages with bees in. And then all I need to do is find the queen, mark the queen, slide it down a tiny bit just to expose that tab there, and then pop the queen in and the job is complete. So for this colony here, really, really simple. All I do now is I put it back together again, and within 24 hours I give it a brand new cell. I don't have to worry about them being hopelessly queenless because I use a cell protector. By the time that virgin, that new virgin emerges, they're going to be desperate for a queen anyway. And I found that system to work very, very well and it's very repeatable as well. So that's it. What a long video. We've taken you all the way through the process for making queen bees, from grafting young larva, feeding them up, turning them into queen cells, virgins emerging from those cells, going out on their mating flights, coming back to the mating nucs and ending up in a cage ready to go out to one of our customers. If you want the very calmest mated queens for your beehive, head over to blackmountainhoney.co.uk and check out our range of queens.