In this walkthrough, Laurence Edwards showcases the first‑generation (F1) offspring of a pure Buckfast breeder queen sourced from Duncan Simmons. He explains how the colony is used as a prolific brood donor for creating splits, mating nucs, and overwintering colonies. Edwards highlights the extraordinary size of the queen, the colony’s rapid egg‑laying and brood production, immaculate apiary hygiene with brand‑new equipment, and a modest but beneficial level of propolis that contributes to colony health. He also points out the calm, gentle temperament of the bees, contrasting them with aggressive strains, and notes that the massive queen will be available for purchase with overwintered nucs next season. The video serves as an instructional demonstration of high‑performance Buckfast genetics and best‑practice apiary management.
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Right, in today's video I'm going to show you some of the F1 offspring of one of our favourite pure breeder queens from Duncan Simmons. We've made tons of splits out of this colony this year. We use it for building big massive colonies that we can take brood from to build up our mating nucs and build up colonies for overwintering. This queen here is possibly the biggest queen I've ever seen, one of the traits that we get from our pure Buckfast breeder queen from Duncan Simmons. So as I said, these colonies here, we use them as brood donors to make up splits to go in the mating nucs. They are very, very well suited for that. They just keep on pumping out the eggs, pumping out the brood. Doesn't matter how many frames of eggs or how many frames of brood or bees that you take away, they seem to bounce back pretty much immediately. And as you can see on here, again, nice clean brand new boxes. Brand new floors, brand new frames. Everything in this apiary is perfectly clean. It really is just superb in terms of the level of apiary hygiene. So Richard nearly went and put that down. I think that's definitely worth having a look at there. No feeding yet this year on this colony, and as you can see there, look at that beautiful white cappings. Even with a limited amount of bees where we're stealing the brood, stealing the bees, They're still able to put in a performance like that. Perfect cappings and lots and lots of honey. So as I said in previous videos, Richard's a massive fan of taking out the frames in one order, putting them back in in exactly the same order. So just getting a close-up there, you can see lots and lots of eggs in there and the larvae just getting big enough that they're going to start capping it over probably in a couple of days. The smell of this hive is truly amazing. Not tons and tons of propolis, but just a little bit of propolis. And I always find that a little bit of propolis means that you've got a nice, healthy, strong colony. So all of these frames here are less than 6 weeks old, and you can see the amount of propolis that the bees have already gone out and collected there. Now, I know Buckfast is supposed to not have that much propolis, but I have to say, I do like a little bit of propolis. Not so much that it's hard to get the frames apart, But you can't beat that smell of going into your colonies and smelling that lovely propolis smell. Right, there we go. That's definitely the biggest queen I think I've ever seen. She is a monster. So there we go, beautiful F1 queen. And you can see why these colonies build up so well. Big, fat, prolific tiger queens like that. That is how you get the best out of your bees. So as you can see again, nice brood pattern. This is the top box, and that bottom box here is full of brood, but really nice, calm, gentle bees. Just what you want. So this is an F1 daughter of one of our pure Buckfast breeder queens, and as you can see, they are just so gentle and calm. I'm not going to push my luck here, but I just want to show you they're not flying off the combs, they're not going for me. I always wear a veil when I'm doing my bee inspections, but I just wanted to show you Nice, calm, gentle bees on a nice day. Not killer bees, not horrible Buckfasts. These are really super calm. So I'm having a great day down at Richard's apiary. That colony there has probably got the biggest queen that I've ever seen, and that queen will be available to someone buying our overwintered nucs next year. Really calm colonies, big prolific queens. What more would you want?
