These Are Our VERY BEST Breeder Queens

We're in Richard's apiary again today, and I'm going to show you a selection of the very best breeder queens that we've got. Now, we have spent a huge amount of money over the years buying in the very best breeder queens that we can get from a variety of different sources. That's really important to us, to not just focus on a single line of bees but to try many different lines and select from the very best. Got about 7 or 8 breeder queens in this apiary here, pure Buckfast breeder queens, but we only graft from 2 of them. We've got a Duncan Simmons pure breeder queen that we use, and we've got a Lutz Egger breeder queen that we use from Germany as well. The reason that we like those 2 so much is because we find that not only do you get really big, strong, prolific, healthy colonies, but the most important thing that we look for in the F1 daughters of our breeder queens is that they're nice and calm and gentle. Now I'll show you a snapshot of this apiary at this point, how many bees are in this apiary, and they're not attacking me at all. Like, I've got colonies there, colonies there, 20 colonies behind me over there, and I can just stand here and talk and the bees are not fussed at all. Now the way that we keep the colonies here so gentle is by influencing the genetics, by bringing in breeder queens, but also by selecting the very best F1 daughters of those queens that remain in this apiary to flood the air with good genetics. Any of the F1 daughters that aren't perfectly calm are taken off to other apiaries. We keep the very best of the best breeder queens and F1 daughters in this apiary, and we use it as a mating apiary as well. In today's video, I'm just going to give you a snapshot of the 2 very best breeder queens that we've got, one from Lutz Egger, one from Duncan Simmons. Right, so you might not think this is what a breeder colony should look like, but you need to think about what we're using these queens for. We are using them for one purpose only, and that is to provide us with eggs in order to make our grafts. We're not testing these queens. You don't test your pure breeder queens. You test the offspring, the F1s, and these have been through vigorous testing not only by us but also by the breeder. So what we're doing now is we are limiting the amount that the queens can lay in order to prolong their lives. We do this by keeping them in nuc boxes Donating bees, donating brood, and making sure that they never get above a few frames big. When you get them into winter, you can build them up, build them up strong to make sure they get through the winter. But throughout the season, we limit them to laying on 1 or 2 frames. So you can see there, got frames of foundation in there as well. That's where we're taking out the frames of brood, also taking out the frames of bees as well. Now what you can see here, this is a pure Buckfast queen. So every single one of those bees there is looking Exactly the same. Doesn't always work like that, but I do find the pure queens do tend to get very homogeneous like this. All of the bees looking very similar indeed. Now, just as Richard's lifting that up, you can see look how calm they are on the comb. I don't think I counted a single bee that even flew off there. They're quite content just to be on the frame. And as you can see there, Richard is highlighting that queen there. So this is one of the queens that we've got from Duncan Simmons, and she is maybe three or 4 years old. You can see all the Buckfast bees, they're tending to her. She's hiding away, but she has been pumping out eggs for 3 or 4 years, and we have just been limiting it as much as we possibly can. Now, this is one of our very favorite queens for a number of reasons. One of the reasons that I really like this queen, and you can kind of see it from the pure Buckfast breeder queen there, is that it produces very, very large If you feed them well, use a good breeding method, you get monster queens coming out, and when they go out and mate, they are absolutely huge. One of the other things I really like about this colony, and this is probably the number one thing that we look for, is that the daughters that this queen creates when mated in our apiary with top-quality drones means that the F1 daughters are very, very calm indeed. You don't need smoke, You don't need a bee suit. You can wear shorts, you can wear a t-shirt. I'd recommend you still probably wear a veil, but if you wanted to, you could actually get away without even wearing a veil. Right, so that's the pure Buckfast breeder queen that we've got from Duncan Simmons. We're going to go over to our other breeder queen that we use now from Lutz Egger and show you the difference. Right, so the next pure queen that I'm going to show you is from Lutz Egger, and this one here is on an equally small nuc, only covering a couple of frames of bees. I'll stress that it's really important if you do find a good pure queen that you like, take care of them and they will last for years. It takes a long time to actually prove that a queen is worth breeding from. You need to make sure that she's pure, be it island mated or artificially inseminated. You need to run that queen and make sure that the pure breeder queen is up to scratch in terms of that she's been correctly mated, she's got a good laying pattern, she's doing everything that she needs to do. You then need to go through a process of testing the F1 daughters, not really over like a few weeks, but over probably a couple of seasons, to make sure that the F1 daughters that you're getting are consistent. And then, and only then, can she become a breeder queen that you're going to go ahead and graft lots and lots of F1 daughters from. Now when we buy them in, we buy them at different stages, and that is reflected in the price that you pay. You can buy numerous artificially inseminated queens Test them yourself, test the daughters yourself, and then select them yourself. Or you could do what most people do, and you go to a respected breeder, and you say to them, "Give me a tested and selected breeder queen." Going to cost you a lot more, but it means that you know that the breeder's gone through that process of not only testing the pure breeder queen, but much more importantly, testing the F1 daughters from that queen to make sure they are up to scratch. Lutzegger queens—really a big fan of these ones as well. Let's go and take a look at this queen. So here's our Lutz Egert queen. As you can see, again, very, very well mated. Beautiful long abdomen marked in a blue and white. And this one here is about 3 years old now. We have had hundreds, if not thousands, of grafts of the breeders in this apiary. And a lot of the F1 daughters of this queen are here because they carry a very calm genetic trait. What we're so impressed about with these ones as well is the amount of honey they produce. Put them into a good situation and they can easily produce upwards of 200 pounds. Now, a really interesting trait with these pure breeder queens, and something that we see regularly, is that if you leave them in a colony with an unlimited amount of space, when you ask them to go ahead and lay thousands of eggs a day, they proportionately increase the size of their abdomen. Whereas this queen here, we are restricting her because we've already tested her, we're happy with what she produces, And you can see now on a restricted size colony that the abdomen gets considerably smaller. Now this doesn't matter, she lays an egg and the eggs are all exactly the same, but as I said previously, what you're trying to do here is limit the amount of eggs that they lay so you can keep those genetics going on forever and ever, up to a maximum of about 5 years. Now what's really sad with these breeder queens is when they come to the end of their life, you know it's happening because the laying pattern becomes not quite as good, and then they start throwing up supersedure cells. Now you can take down the supersedure cells, probably like a couple of rounds of brood, but if they throw up supersedure cell after supersedure cell after supersedure cell, you know the game is up, and then there's nothing that you can do to save that colony. The only thing you can do at that point, and it's something that we do regularly, is that you take a virgin queen from that pure breeder queen and you send it back to the breeder and you say, this line was fantastic, Here's a virgin, artificially inseminate it and try and keep that line going. We've done that with some of the breeders that we use and we're waiting to receive the inseminated queens back and we are very, very excited about it. We have spent thousands and thousands of pounds buying in top quality genetics and I think you can see the results in this apiary just in terms of how calm the bees are.