Laurence Edwards spent £5,000 on 2022 artificially inseminated queens from Duncan Simmons to breed calmer, healthier bees. He tests each queen and her daughters in nucleus colonies before promoting them to breeder status, watching for supersedure cells and managing drone production to monitor how well the colonies accept the new genetics.
I told you I have been hoarding breeder queens. I've also bought myself quite a large amount of artificially inseminated queens that are 2022, so not tested, not breeder queens, but just a good old batch of artificially inseminated queens that I can select from. And if I want to use them as a breeder queen once I've tested them and once I've tested the daughters, I can go ahead and do that. Also gives me the ability to take F1s from these queens and then to flood the area with lots of very good quality drones. I'm very excited. Today I'm going to show you one of my artificially artificially inseminated queens from Duncan Simmons. Right, so both of these nucleus colonies here, I took out my F1 Buckfast queens and I put in the F0 pure breeder queen, whatever you want to call it. I've already had 2 in this apiary that have tried to supersede, which is really annoying. Hopefully we won't find the same in here. Maybe we'll find 2 queens though. If we do, I'll do the same as I've done in the previous one, which is cage up the artificially inseminated queen. I'll go and try and introduce that elsewhere and we'll see what the F1 daughters are like. Hopefully though, the rest of them won't try and supersede. What will be really interesting in this video though is The difference between the F1 Buckfast offspring and the pure F0 offspring. Hopefully we can find that queen. So here's the colony. This one's a double, really nice, prolific, strong colony of bees. Artificial queen's only been in about 4 weeks now, so most of this offspring here is the F1 Buckfast offspring. I'm going to get in here, double-check. Hopefully we're not going to see any supersedure cells. So hopefully you can see her there, artificially inseminated queen number 32. I've got 12 of these in this apiary, and in total I've got about 40 of them coming into my apiary this year. I'll just get my face in view there so you can see how calm the bees are. All the nurse bees on this frame, really nice frame of brood, but very, very calm bees, very docile. And it means I'm going to be flooding the air with good quality drones from this colony, but also from all of the daughters from this queen. The F1 daughters are going to give me a pure drone, and it means that I can flood the air and get some really, really good results of F1 of all of my breeder So there she is, really well accepted. This one here, definitely not trying to supersede, got eggs in all of the cells, but also I've been through the frames and they're not superseding her, which is good to see. Pheromones clearly good on this one. I'll have to check out all the rest of them though, just to make sure, and I'll have to make sure going forward that I get back in time to ensure that the supersedure cells aren't hatching. If I can get down before, it's an easy one, I'll just take them down, and I'll keep on doing that until the end of the year.
