These Bees Are In For A TREAT

You know I'm a massive fan of artificially inseminated breeder queens to use to graft, to get my F1 queens to make up beautiful nucleus colonies of bees. Now mind all these robbing bees at the moment, we are in an active robbing situation in this apiary and they think that I am the food. However, in this video I'm going to show you my latest and greatest line of artificially inseminated queens and there is no way that anybody is finding out who this breeder is, Because it is a top secret breeder in Germany, breeding some of the very best Buckfast lines going. I have 5 of these queens and I have an ongoing order for 5 new queens every single year. I have seen these colonies, I've seen what these bees can do, but this is the first time I've managed to get my hands on them and I'm so, so excited to get these bees through the winter, get them into next year and start grafting from them. The queen in this colony here was released about 2 or 3 days ago. So all of the bees in this colony have got nothing to do with the artificially inseminated queen. But what I have to do is I have to come back regularly every 5 or 6 days just to take down any supersedure cells, because bees are stupid. They don't understand when a beautiful pedigree queen is put in there that they should probably leave her to it and not try and supersede her. They sense that something's wrong with her because of the way that she's been mated, and they try to supersede her for weeks on end. We do not want this queen to be superseded. So I go in constantly doing these inspections, taking down any cells. If I find any cells in there today, I will show you the cells. But all I'm going to do in this video is just show you the queen and show you how incredibly beautiful she is. So you can see she's in a very, very strong colony. Always make up the colony super strong. And you'll see what I've got here. This is the queen excluder element of the feeder in here because I had an absolute nightmare with this queen. I dropped her into the feeder. I know. Most expensive queen I've ever got, and I dropped her into the feeder. I couldn't get her out, so I just took the queen excluder bit out. And you know, she's a breeder queen. She's got class about her. She would have found her way back into the frames now. So as I said, excuse the bees. Really late in the evening doing this video, and I had some serious robbing issues over there. So the bees are kind of on guard a little bit at the moment. I've also not got my smoker with me. So this is the cage that she came in. It's a JZ Beezy cage, which if you didn't know, is actually impregnated with a pheromone. Which is supposed to improve introduction. I got all of these queens introduced with no problems whatsoever. I've got the number on there which denotes the queen that I'm using, and obviously being a pure Buckfast queen, I've got the breeder certificate to go along with this for the maternal and the paternal line. Both lines come on the certificate, and it means that if I find one that I'm particularly happy with, I can go back and order the same queen again. So no sign of the queen just yet. We do still have eggs in there, which is good. I really don't want to have to take this nuc apart and try and kind of break open that feeder. Absolutely gutted that I dropped her in there. I couldn't believe it when I did it. I was filming her for a lovely little short video and obviously she went, but no problem whatsoever because I have just found her on this frame here. So here she is, beautiful queen, number 19, this one. Lovely dark tip, and she has been laying up that frame like it's going out of fashion. Like, I honestly can't remember the last time that I put a queen in And they've laid up like 3 or 4 brood frames this big within a couple of days. Top, top quality bees. What I'm so excited about as well is to see the change in the genetics of these bees. You can see they're a bit flightier, these ones, and obviously next year you will see if we keep that artificially inseminated queen in there, the genetics of these colonies should change completely. So there she is, number 19. She really is a beauty, isn't she? I'm going to clip this queen, but I'm not clipping it yet. I find you get on a little bit better if you don't clip them, but coming into next year, if we get them through the year, I'll definitely be clipping her. I've not seen any supersedure cells just yet, but I will continue to go through this colony just to double-check. You can see the wasps diving in onto this colony, but I am so, so excited for this one. So we've got 5 different artificially inseminated queens, and each one has got a different maternal, a different paternal combination. They're tried and tested lines, but they are this year's queen. So what I'll be doing is I'll be doing some tests off the daughters of these ones next year, and then I will pick a favorite and I will run with that favorite. All of them will be there or thereabouts, but it is always a good habit to get into trying to test these queens. And not just testing the breeder queens, you need to test the offspring of those breeder queens. We'll keep those test queens as drone mothers as well to flood the area with drones. But it's really good to see that that queen's been fully accepted into this colony here. Just going to take a quick look now to see if I can show you some of the eggs in this colony. A little bit dark here today, but hopefully you can see down there she has laid it up so well, like just all the way down to where my GoPro is there. Feeding these bees as well because they are a little bit light on feed, and also they've got a little bit of space still to go on those frames and feeders frames. So I've got no risk of backfilling with too much nectar. So there you go, that's the first look at my brand new line of German artificially inseminated queens. You're going to see loads and loads, not only from these queens but also from their daughters. We're going to get rid of these buzzy bees and we are going to get ourselves the best bees that money can buy.