Where To Keep Bees? This GARDEN Has 40 Beehives!

I'm in the garden of Carl Lockyer and I'm looking at some of the calmest bees I've ever seen. In this video, we're going to go through Carl's bees in his garden. There must be 20 or 30 colonies in this garden. It's a beautiful sunny day and we're going to chat to Carl and see how he gets his bees to be so gentle. So as you can see, we're standing in the garden here and we've got a colony directly in front of me here. And before I talk, I should probably introduce Carl a little bit. So this is Carl. I've been speaking to Carl a lot on the internet. Carl inseminates a huge amount of queens and produces some of the very best artificially inseminated queens going. He's invited me up here today. I'm doing some videos, and as you can see, we've got a full colony of bees. In fact, we've got a huge amount of colonies of bees in Carl's garden, very active colonies, and they're not stinging us at all. So, Carl, thanks for the invite.

This is a queenless colony. It's a cell raiser. We'll go into this one after, but we'll need to put our kit on because they will get a bit uppity once you go in there. But as you can see, they're not bombing out and trying to kill us.

So while Carl puts that one back together, we're going to go inside, open up some of the other colonies here. No stings yet, and we're going to go about all of the videos today with no protective equipment whatsoever because these are genuinely the calmest bees I've ever seen. So what have we got next, Carl? What have we got in this one? I'm genuinely amazed at how calm they all are. Like, I've got some nice calm bees. I've also got some very angry bees as well. You tend to know which ones are the nice calm ones, don't you, when you get going with them?

This is not a big colony yet. It's just a colony I've started off. There's a queen in here, she's marked yellow.

It's a beautiful queen there, Carl. So is she mated, artificially mated, or open mated?

This is open mated. This is what I'm going to be using next year for inseminating purposes, because I'll use this as a drone line. You know, the pattern is not really big because there's not enough bees to cover the whole frame.

And how are you finding the bees responding to the lack of incoming nectar at the moment. It's pretty shocking, isn't it?

Yeah, there's a lot of robbing going on, a lot of wasps about. I've had to shut all the hives down to a bee space, you know, to stop the robbing in these, you know, small colonies. Just babysitting the hives, if you like.

It's not stopping the queens laying eggs though. You can see she's really going for it here, isn't she?

Yeah, she's trying. She just needs a few more bees, but I don't want to exhaust the queen before next year because I need to use her next year.

Yeah, she's doing very nicely indeed. Right, so I think Your challenge today, Carl, is that you've got to open up a colony and try and get them to sting me, because I've not seen anything yet that's remotely aggressive at all.

I don't think you're going to find that, not unless we open this one here. This is a cell raiser. We'll show you some queen cells after. I don't even know how many they've taken, but I will certainly put a veil on when I'm doing that. Maybe no gloves, but normally when you tap on the frames, they'll come up and kill you. These are all right.

Yeah, there's no running at all on any of the top frames. Carl's just picked up one there. Yeah, not even trying to sting him. So very, very nice, very calm bees. I think the true test is when they get a little bit bigger, isn't it? And I know later on today we're going to go and look at some of the bigger colonies and some out apiaries, but nice to see that the small ones are behaving themselves. Right, so same line as the one before, but this one's been artificially inseminated. I just have to say, the little walk through one of the aisles here, there's so many bees flying. And they're kind of coming into me and like bashing into me where I'm walking in their beeline, and then they just buzz off and go and do their own thing. No aggression whatsoever. Even the one that you said was going to go for me seemed very, very calm.

This one's marked green because it's the line from the breeder where I got the virgin queen from. So she's marked green 54, and these are the same.

So I like your little 3-frame mini nucs. Do you overwinter them like that?

No, they'll go into 5-framers with food on the top.

Okay.

Artificially inseminated queens, when they first start laying, they will lay some drones and you think, oh, I've got it wrong. But no, you haven't got it wrong.

Why do they do that, do you know?

They just do sometimes. And then other times they'll just lay normal eggs. Here's this queen. As you can see, she's a very similar colour, you know, on the body. Obviously a green disc. She's just started. I gave them this frame to draw out a new frame because I like to keep some nice clean comb in the hives. So there's that queen. They're all nice and calm.

Yeah, you can see, super calm, aren't they?

Yeah.

I'm going to get you to do that on some of the bigger colonies later.

A nice pattern. You're joking. You just want to see me get stung.

So a couple of colonies there. You've got one artificially inseminated and one F1 open maple. Okay, they're quite small colonies, but we're in an apiary today with 30 or 40 colonies, and the temperament really is spot on. We are going to open up a couple more here today just to give it a real test to see if we can get them kind of stimulate at least a little bit of aggression. It's really nice to see someone taking it so seriously and trying to breed good quality genetics to make sure that you can beekeep in your garden like this. I've had it before, one or two colonies in my garden. and they're just chasing people, and as soon as anyone's in the garden, that's it, they try and sting them. This garden here, we've got 30 colonies and I'm not getting stung by a single bee. Right, Carl, let's do one more colony.

Well, I'll do this big one.

Right, Carl has said we're going to do the biggest colony in the apiary. We're going to open it up and Carl's going to give us the history on this queen now.

The history on this queen is the mother was a Peter Little queen that I've had for about 3 years. Unfortunately, she were in this box and About 2 weeks ago, she just popped her clogs.

Oh no.

And I could tell she were going downhill because all she were doing were drone laying.

That's not good, is it?

So, uh, but this, this is the daughter of Peter Little's queen, naturally mated in this yard.

Okay, cool.

So, and I haven't had the lid off of this one for— I've never had it off this year, and I know she's superseded. Full mated, that's the only thing that's on the ticket. I don't know what these are like at all because I've not had the lid off of this Vicious, yeah. God, it's well glued down.

So this is going to be exciting. This is a colony that Carl's not gone into all year, superseded, and potentially a little bit vicious. But I just can't believe that they're going to be that bad.

They seem not bad. They seem not bad at all, Lawrence.

Should we get me to pull a frame out then?

Um, I don't know what they're going to be like when you start pulling frames out.

Let's pull a frame out, come on.

Especially with a dearth on, you know. This will be a food frame anyway.

So as you can see, Carl's clearly an expert handling the bees really nicely, way better than I ever do with my sausage fingers.

There's a good lot of drone brood on that last frame.

Yeah, want me to hold that one while you get another one out?

The only time I get stung is when I put me fingers underneath here without observing what I'm doing.

So we're doing quite well so far, couple of frames in, no stings whatsoever.

Plenty of honey on this, plenty of honey on that. In fact, that frame can come to the outside.

Yeah, there's a, there's a huge amount of honey in there, isn't there?

Yeah.

So you say this was superseded daughter from an F— from a pure queen or from an F1?

This was superseded from an F1 queen last year and it's superseded again. The queen is not marked in here.

So it's superseded again, so it could be F3. So there we go, there's a bit of myth-busting there. You hear it all the time, don't you? F2 buckfast, F3 buckfast.

These are landing on you. God, I'm covered in propolis. Yeah.

I love the propolis. But you do, you hear it all the time, don't you? F2, F3 Buckfast are vicious. This is an F3 Buckfast colony and look, nothing going on whatsoever. We're being quite aggressive with them as well, like Carl showed you before, tapping the frames. Right, let's stop pushing our luck, do you reckon? Yeah, we'll get that one back in.

Well, I mean, they'll land on you. They're not that bad. Being gentle with them is the key to a lot. We aren't bashing around at them.

Yeah, I hear that as well, being gentle, and it is good to be gentle, but I think if you're as gentle as you can possibly be with the most vicious bees, they're still going to sting you. It's clear the genetics here are very, very good.

This one's another Peter Little one, naturally mated in the yard this year, and she seems to be doing good. It's a nice 5-frame colony, plenty of bees in it. Normally, if you're waving your arms around They'll go for you.

Right, so Carl, get your face down right by the colony. Let me just get— can you actually like crouch down like so your face is right by it?

Right, I'm right here, I'm right on it. This colony is another Peter Little, which is the 125 line, and this has been a really nice lot of bees. I've had some lovely queens off of that one before we lost her. Before I lost her, I created a line So I've got a line for next year which I'm going to use, the 125, and I'm going to use that yellow queen for the queen mother next year. And I'm going to use these for the drone line, of which they're down on the field. They'll be brought up next year and set up so I can go down the line and the genetics— I can get different genetics off of each colony because they're not all the same. Very much the same, if you like. If that makes any sense.

Right, so I think that proves it. We're probably in the calmest apiary in the UK. Absolutely amazed with all of these bees. If you are interested in learning more about Carl's operations, definitely hit the subscribe button because we have got about 12 videos being filmed today on all different aspects of this apiary and Carl's queen rearing operation.