There Is Something SO Special About This Colony

In today's video, we're going to take a look inside one of my artificially inseminated breeder queens, the mother to pretty much every UK mated queen that we sold this year. So the queen inside this colony here was sent to me early in 2022 by Duncan Simmons, one of our favourite breeders of top quality calm Buckfast queens. I shook swarmed this colony earlier on this year and they've been up at the heather making use of whatever nectar that they can bring in, in what has been pretty much the worst heather season I can remember in North Let's get inside, see how this colony is building up for winter, and see just how nice this queen is. And fingers crossed that she's not superseded just yet. So unfortunately, this is what a lot of my colonies are looking like up at the heather this year. I shook swarmed them into a single 6-frame Langstroth brood box about 5 or 6 weeks ago now. I gave them a little bit of feed and then I just left them to it to see what they would get from the heather. I've got my Apivar strips in there, so the heather was only really going to ever be a feed for them. But as you can see, not that many bees and not that much stores in there, if anything. So what I'm doing today is I'm going to go inside, going to have a look in here. I'm going to look at that queen, look at the brood, do my checks. But I'm also going to condense this colony back down to a single brood box because there is no need for all of that additional space on top. So when I shook swarm this colony about 6 or 7 weeks ago now and they were building up nicely, there was nothing wrong with going on and putting an additional extension box on with 8 frames to see if we got a bumper heather crop. And I was hoping that these bees would be filling this by now and it'd be full over the 8 frames and the 6 frames below, and I wouldn't have to feed the colony that much going into winter. But that's clearly not happened because the weather has been absolutely shocking, and I've just been giving them enough food just to get them through. You can feed your colonies too much at this point in the year, and although the weather today is shocking, over the next few days it looks okay and the ivy is just starting to come out. However, I'm definitely not going to leave this extension box on. It was okay to have it on 6 weeks ago with the thought that the bees might produce a decent amount of honey. Now we're into the middle of September, it is unwanted space and we need to get it off to give the bees the best chance of getting through the winter. So you can see that the bees have started to draw this out, and given a decent heather flow, they would have definitely drawn all of this out. But I'm definitely not leaving this extension box on because what's that going to do for the bees? All it's going to do is give them additional space to keep warm, And it's just going to cause them problems. So I'll shake off all of the bees off all of these frames. I'll show you a couple of them as I take them out, but then when we get downstairs into the brood box, that is going to be full to the brim with bees. So as you can see, they've not really touched any of these frames. You've got a couple where they've just started to draw it out, but pretty much like 80% of them, they've not even touched. That one there looks not too bad, but as I said, no need for them to stay on the colony. So what we have here now is a brood box completely And utterly full to the brim with bees. The bees really do know best when it comes to preparing themselves for winter, and all they've done is they've just condensed themselves downstairs into the brood area. And this is kind of what I expect to see when they're getting ready to cluster up for winter— not touching any of that stuff upstairs, but full, absolutely full downstairs. So I know it doesn't even look like there's any bees in there, does it? They're not on the top frames at all, not bubbling over, and that is because it's about 14 degrees here today. But you can see down every single line we are full to the brim with bees. You'll notice I've got 2 Apivar strips in there, but they're not full Apivar strips. I've got 1.5. The guidance for that says 1 Apivar strip per 5 national brood frames, and these are Langstroth frames, so I've got 1.5 strips in there, which is pretty much exactly the dose that you will want. Now I've done a separate video on this already, but these Langstroth nucs Really are the very best. What I just love is this ability to give myself so much space immediately by taking out the feeder. I can just pop it down here to one side, and then I've just given myself like a huge amount of space to work. I know people are going to get bored with me going on about this, but I just hope Payne's bring this into the national. Make my life so much easier. So look how chilled and calm these bees are. Not a single bee out flying today, but look at them. Just chilling out on the combs, running a little bit light on food, these ones. So I'm going to go around and feed everything that's up here today. That's the reason for me being here. But how calm and gentle are these bees? Like, I'll do the Carl test, which is 5 frames, 5 knocks, and they are not coming up onto those top bars at all. So this is what beekeeping is all about. It's a miserable day, the bees aren't flying, there's no flow coming in, there's no nectar, there's no pollen. And the bees are chilled. Really nice, calm, chilled out bees. Didn't always used to be the case, did it? I used to have some horrific bees, and it's only through buying good quality genetics and bringing them into my apiaries that you can get the bees to actually do this. I had the National Bee Unit doing inspections up here earlier on this year, obviously got the all clear, and they were really surprised at just how calm the bees were. Because previously when they'd come up here, the bees were a little bit touchy and a little bit angry. And then we've had a clean sweep of the UK mated queens up here, and they were really astonished as to how calm and gentle these bees are. So much so that I can do my inspection today on a miserable day with absolutely no protective equipment. So although on that side of the comb there, there's not a huge amount of stores, it's quite surprising. There's a decent amount of weight, and you can see it on this side here. Beautiful white cappings. Like, I can smell the ling heather here, even though they've not produced much of a surplus, and I wasn't really going for a surplus. They've definitely got themselves a decent feed and it's kept them ticking over until feed season. You can smell the ling heather, it's absolutely beautiful. So as I work in towards the middle, all of these frames aren't even completely drawn out yet, and that goes to show just how rubbish this ling heather year was. Definitely the worst in memory for me. We had one week towards the end that was okay, like nice weather, but it was pretty much too late for the heather. And it was weird, as you went over the moors it was just brown. The whole year it was brown, never even got to the point where it was purple. But I've got another good frame there, another nice frame, solid frame of stores. What's so noticeable at the moment, especially with this colony, is how much those nests are contracting. Like, I'm on to the second frame there and there's still no sign of any brood, still no sign of the queen. It's really interesting to see just how quickly that brood cluster is diminishing. Middle of September at the moment, the bees are getting ready for winter. We're going into the third frame, and I still can't see that much brood. Still no sign of that queen. So tiny little bit of capped brood on this frame here. Nothing on this side though. Starting to get a little bit worried at this point. There are some eggs in here, luckily. It does happen with artificially inseminated queens. They get to the end of the year, and they do just think, right, we're going to supersede them. What's good is you generally don't get too many swarms with the artificially inseminated queens. It's weird unless you let them get huge, and they just go in May. tend to be relatively easy to get them to not swarm, but it is frustrating when they supersede. You can see from that angle there just how much of a benefit it is being able to take that feeder out. These are really, really well propolised, these frames, but I've got so much space to work. So there we go. It's the middle of winter, isn't it? Look at that frame there. Probably like 70% stores, a tiny little bit of brood in the middle, lots of pollen, but we've still got our queen. Just look how calm these bees are. Like, this for me is what beekeeping is all about. And I know it's like a shameless plug for our queens and our nucs, but I do feel quite proud of what we can produce here now in terms of these calm bees. And I only found out through this the hard way, like people saying you have to keep local bees, local bees are the way forward, the blacker the better. And I've not found any black bees that you can do this with. Beekeeping for me should be like a Fun pastime. It should be nice. Should be able to get the kids involved. I just find it so much more fun when the bees are as chilled out as these bees here are. You can see here, like the bees not even fuss with me coming in and touching them. She really is a very, very nice queen. Now we didn't buy this queen as a breeder queen. We just bought this as part of a batch of about thirty or thirty-five artificially inseminated queens, and she was the best of the bunch. And you can see why I chose her. She is just So, so calm, but very prolific as well. Like her daughters easily filling up a double national, crazy amounts of honey. And how nice is that to see there? The bees feasting out on some ling heather honey in there. I kind of want to get my finger in and have a little bit of a taste. They did just see off a wasp there though, so maybe I'll resist that temptation. Okay, I couldn't resist the temptation at all. And you know what? It's not heather honey at all. They really struggled for heather this year. Even with the white cappings, that frame there just tastes like general summer honey. Really nice honey, don't get me wrong, beautiful honey, but definitely not Ling, which is very surprising considering that everything that you can see that way is just moorland. Right, it's time to stop messing around with this colony. This is the artificially inseminated queen that is the mother to every single one of the UK-mated queens that we've sold this year. Fingers crossed we get her through the year. What I'm going to do now though is condense it down, remove those frames, give them a feed, and hopefully we'll see this one again in the spring.