You Wont Believe How Calm These Bees Are!

I'm going to take a final look inside my F0 2022 breeder queen colony before we shut them up for winter. Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Now I know I've said I don't go into my colonies this late in the year, but there's one thing that we need to do on all of my colonies, and that is take out the Apivar strips. Probably the most important job of the year. Make sure you get those strips out. I'm doing another video at the moment talking about the importance of taking those strips out, but what it does offer me is a last chance opportunity to crack the lid, take a look at the bees, pull out one frame or two frames just to get that Apivar strip out, take a look at the bees, take a look at the brood, see if we can see the queen, see how the bees are responding to that late season requeening. and see if we've got a nice gentle breeder queen on our hands. So that's what I'm gonna do in this video. Gonna be a really nice, simple, short video. But if you're buying UK-mated Buckfast queens off us in 2022, this is gonna be the mother. But you cannot judge the temperament on this video yet because you're still gonna have old bees lying around from when they were requeened about 6 or 7 weeks ago. The real test is when I do this video in April or May next year, And of course, I will follow it up next year and do this video again just to show you what that breeder queen, what that colony is looking like with an F0 pure Buckfast queen. So I'll get my bee suit on, I'll jump over into the colony, and I'll take a look how they're getting on. Right, you can call me stupid, you can call me crazy, you can call me mad. Hold my hands up to all of those 3 things. This colony here is my F0 breeder queen. I bought this queen from a very well-respected breeder, and I've said to him, I want to be able to create F1 queens from this F0 daughter that are as gentle as they can possibly be. I'm not gonna judge this colony on the temperament now, but what I am gonna do is I'm gonna try and get the frames out without putting a bee suit on. No veil, no gloves, nothing, dressed in black. Let's see if I take any stings. I'm gonna go ahead and say I don't think I'm gonna take any stings, and if I do, I'll probably blame them on some other colonies over there. But let's see how they go. This is what I wanna do. I wanna get to the point where I can inspect my colonies with just a veil on. That's it, nothing else. No gloves, no bee suit. I wanna make things easy. I see people do it in America. If you can do it in America, you can do it in the UK, right? It's constant iterative improvement in my bee stock. That's what I'm aiming for. And this is a small step for next year to improve the temperament of my bees. Let's get inside. Let's see what they're like. Let's take the Apivar strip out. Let's hope I don't get stung. Right, so the first thing we're seeing here, I've taken the lid off and the feeder boxes are full. So this colony here is gonna be huge. You can tell that already, 'cause sometimes you open these up and you can see a few bees. When you can see bees crammed in like that, you know there is gonna be lots and lots of bees in here. So I'm nervous, I'm not gonna lie. I'm definitely nervous. What am I doing this for again? Let's hope I don't get stung. But let's open that box up. Let's see what the temperament of these bees are like. Well, that's a really good start, like a 10 out of 10 start, because a lot of my colonies at this time of year, you open the box like that and you're getting battered, absolutely battered. And look how chilled out they are. And I know it's a bit cold, so it's not really the fairest comparison in the world, but they're really, really chilled out. So look, if I If I put my hand across the bees like this— Wow, seriously, this breeder has done such a good job here. This was 7 weeks since this queen was put in here, and this time of the year they will kind of ramp up production of the winter bees. I still think you're going to have some of the old bees in here as well, but you're going to have lots and lots of the new daughters of that F0 queen. I'm quite amazed at how chilled out they are. I'm gonna show you on another camera now. I'll get my hand really close in there just to show you how much they're ignoring me. They just do not care that I'm here. Really, really happy with this. So this is what the colony's looking like. You can see how calm they are. It's a big strong colony, well over 6 frames. In fact, there was a couple of dead bees on the entrance as well, which means there's probably been a little bit of bearding as well, and they've just got cold 'cause there's not enough room for them in here. I don't worry too much about that. It's a good sign for me. I want the boxes full. But how about this? I'm going to put my hand across it. I'm going to get really down close to the bees. You can see my little finger waggling there because I'm nervous. They are not interested in me whatsoever. This is really good news. So I thought I'd kind of do a little bit of a close-up as well, because you just can't do this with my bees, and you can't get your head kind of this close and talk to them and say, bees, you're doing a really good job going into winter. I just like that your temperament is so much more improved over the previous queen. Keep up the good work, see you in the spring. You can see as well, if I put my hand here, I'm literally touching the bees here. You can see I'm touching the bees. And maybe you can't get that, but I genuinely am. I'm going in and I'm touching them with my bare hands, and I'm not getting stung on the hands, and I'm not getting stung on the face either. Okay, there's going to be a bigger test. I need to get that Apivar strip out. I'm going to go and get a hive tool just to loosen things up a little bit as well. I want to pull a couple of frames out, and I just want to give them that test. If I get a couple of stings, I really won't hold it against them because this is 10 out of 10 in terms of progress, 10 out of 10 in terms of temperament so far. And I just can't wait to get these bees into work next year, get some F1 daughters. And obviously the F1 daughters aren't going to be perfectly pure like these ones are. They're not going to be controlled with the drone, so you will get some variance. But to have this as a starting point is going to improve my bee stock so much. Right, so let's get in there, feed First thing I'm going to do, really gently, I'm going to try and get in there, take out the apivar strip. Just going to brush the bees off with my hand. I don't want to damage the bees. This is the secret to having calm bees as well. Don't annoy them, don't kill their mates, don't crush them. Try and be as gentle as you possibly can. And to do that in beekeeping is quite difficult. It really is an art and a skill, something I'm not very good at. I got big fat sausage fingers. So to have that dexterity, to have that fine motor skill to not crush bees, I do find it a little bit difficult. But I'm going to do my best, my very best, not to annoy them. See if we can get the Apivar strip out without me taking a sting to the face. Do you think I'm going to manage it? I'm a little bit nervous. And you know what? I had no reason to be nervous there. As soon as I started to move them with my finger, As soon as I started to move them with the hive tool, you can just tell how they react. What they did is they moved away from my finger and they moved away from my hive tool. That is bees that have been bred to do that. This colony over there definitely wouldn't do that. If you moved them, they'd sting you. They'd kind of say, what are you doing moving me with your big fat sausage fingers? Get away. And this is my warning to remove yourself from the vicinity of my beehive or we're going to sting you even more. These guys just moved away. And I've got a couple that are sitting on there now, and you can see they're just not interested in me at all. And you have to think, like, I'm all dressed in black today, I've got a big fluffy microphone here as well that the bees hate. They hate that microphone so much, they really do. And they're just not interested. Chilled out, really good, calm, friendly bees. So excited. Right, I'm going to put my Apivar strip off to one side. Need to dispose of these carefully, so I just wrap them up, get them out the way, Treat them all at the end of the year. But that's step one done. We've got the Apivar strip out, and I've not taken a sting anywhere yet, especially not to the face. So I'm gonna try and take one frame out, and I'm doing this purely in the interest of science. This isn't just curiosity here, because I know I tell people don't go messing around in your hive this late on in the year, but I just can't get over quite how calm they are. So I'm going to go in, I'm going to take One frame out, hold it up just to show you how calm they are, and obviously because you all want to see me get stung in the face, so it does make a good video as well. Center frame, I'm going to get it out, see what the bees are doing. And there we go, simple as that. Check how calm these bees are. I've never seen bees this calm, not even flying up to check, not bouncing me on the face. They are just working as if I'm not here. Just can't believe it. I'm going to put these back together again, be really, really careful with it. I've come to do what I wanted to do, which is get that Apivar strip out. I pulled a frame out, I showed you the temperament. We've got brood as well, really nice to see brood at this time of year, but I just can't believe how calm they are. You look, I can just put them there, they're not interested. I can get my face really close into them, like I'm talking really, really close into them. This is going to make beekeeping such a pleasure, I can't wait. So there you go, this is the last look of the F0 breeder queen that I'm going to use for my UK-mated Buckfast queens for 2022. I think you'll agree this looks perfect in terms of temperament. I've seen what they can do for disease resistance. I've seen what they can do for honey production as well. I can't wait to get into the queen rearing season for next year, make myself some F1 queens. So there we go, the colony is looking fantastic. Really pleased with how that nuc is coming along, pleased with the brood pattern. I'm pleased with the temperament, but like I said, you can't fully judge that until you get into 2022 and 100% of the bees are gonna be the daughter of that F0 queen. I hope you enjoyed that little look into the colony though. As always, please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time. Bye.