[music]
So we're here on Thorah Island, we're in the
bee yard, it's a beautiful day and a beautiful
location, we're all very happy to be here.
I like to explain a little bit about why
we bring our bees here and what the
whole Buckfast process is.
We've brought many mating nucleus colonies over
with us today, we brought them from an
adjacent island, Georgina Island, to Thor Island
and we have different drone lines on each
of those islands.
The drone line that we have on this island
is very well established and they're very very
gentle colonies and they have a low
tendency to swarm and they're quite
productive so we're really happy with this drone line.
Want to give a little shout out to Paul Montoux
who the late great Paul Montoux who worked
together with us Buckfast breeding.
He managed this island for quite a number of years
and we're carrying things on and the drone line
that we are using now a lot of that
comes from his efforts.
So, we have gentle bees and the gentle
behavior is passed from the male side
when you're breeding bees
so if you have gentle colonies
producing the males that your queens are
going to be meeting with that will be passed on.
One the flip side on the
female side the hygienic behavior
keeping the hive clean,
doing things that help prevent diseases,
that's inherited from the
female side, so we're trying to do both
of those things here on the island.
We have full-size colleagues that
provide the drones that we want and then
we bring these mini mating nucleus colonies
that you saw us handling from the truck,
to the boat, to the truck and out, and now we've
spread them around here and opened them up
and let those fly.
Very soon we're going to go through and harvest
these queens and take them back so that
we can requeen colonies on the mainland.
I'd like to introduce a couple of people
here that help us out.
This is Laurie Simard.
Laurie: Hi Paul.
Paul: Hey Laurie.
Laurie is the boat captain.
She gets us out here to the island and
we obviously can't do things on the island
without that transportation and she
volunteers to assist us with our bee work
while we're out here on the island.
She's got some of her own beehives,
is getting going with them and just going
to ask Laurie a couple questions about
the history of the island, it's a great spot for bees.
Can you tell us a little bit about the history
of the island?
Laurie: OK in the late or mid eighteen hundreds
this island was used by the Chippewa
Indian native Indians of Georgina as a
fishing stopover and then some people
came over from Britain and ended up on
this island there's three founding
families on this island,
the Whites, the Davidsons and the Warrens,
and my cousin Margie, who is a volunteer
with us as well, and myself we share our
great-grandfather, he's from the island,
so they settled on this island and they
farmed on the island, they had sheep
they had beef and I think there was even
some dairy cattle on the island.
It was a pretty harsh way of life,
you've got to consider in the winter
coming over with a horse and cutter over
to the island on the ice.
There was many mishaps, but they
farmed here and this was their home
and now over the generations those
families have remained on the island but
we also have other cottages, there's 50 other
cottages and so we have people from the
States that were found in from the
States that use this as a fishing camp
and they all have cottages on the island
so it's an island where once you get here
you want to stay here, so we have a
lot of fourth and fifth generation people on
the island and it's a perfect place for
bees and you know we enjoy volunteering
and I've been a volunteer for about five
years and I guess that's back to you.
I don't know what else you want to know.
Paul: Well because it was farmed the land was
cleared and it's not farmed anymore so
bee plants grown up voluntarily
we have sumac, we have sweet clover,
many, many other plants grow in this kind of
environment and it's because they do well
foraging, the colonies thrive and that's
really important when we're trying to do
this breeding work we don't want to have
hives that are struggling to keep going
or they're not producing enough drones
and that they do have to be really
thriving to reduce the quantity of
drones that we need for mating.
Going to introduce somebody else here
this is Rachel Bryans and she works with Munro Honey
and Munro Honey is another Buckfast
breeder that we collaborate with.
We actually provide a stud service for Munro Honey
so they bring their nucs out here and
those nucs and the queens in those nucs
get to mate with our queens.
Rachel what do you do with those queens?
Rachel: Once we collect those queens Paul we
take them home and we test them further
for hygienic behavior and we'll raise our
own queens from those and sell them to
the beekeepers of Ontario.
Paul: How many queens a year would you produce?
Rachel: I would say about 3,000 queens.
Paul: Is that right? Wow that's a lot of queens.
And who do you sell them to?
Rachel: Just basically all the beekeepers,
hobbyists, commercial beekeepers of Ontario.
Paul: So they really getting spread throughout
the province then?
Rachel: Yes.
Paul: That's great.
How many mating nucleus colonies do
you have to produce that many queens?
Rachel: We have a thousand.
Paul: A thousand. Wow that's great.
Well you must have a lot of great people
working with you then.
Rachel: We do. That's right.
Paul: Yeah, that's good. Thanks, Rachel.
So we're going to move on now and
get some get some work done here.
Dave's going to start is going to
open up a hive and show you how nice
these bees are and how we are able to
use those colonies to
produce the genetics that we want,
so Dave will open up a hive now.
David: OK so here we have kind of one of our
full-sized strong hives here up on Thorah Island.
So it's kind of going to show you what
the kind of bees are like around here
and then how we breed them and
this is kind of the end result.
So all the supers actually real
productive bees this year all the supers
we put on them previously
are already of jam packed full of honey
and they kind of stay as
a nice full-sized colony.
It's nice and strong because they really
have that low tendency to swarm.
We keep the wraps on here all winter long
and into the spring we tend to not get up
here too too early and none of the
colonies swarmed this year they really
have that kind of bred in them, but the
other thing you can kind of see it as we
lift off this inner cover just how
gentle these bees are.
So again we're not we haven't used any
smoke on these bees yet.
When we're actually working up here
we don't use any smoke
so real gentle bees and you can see
just as I wave my hand over this colony
none of them are even jumping up
to kind of see my hand, that's kind of
an invitation to attack, waving your hand
kinda sharply over top of the colony.
So real calm bees, they really again you can
kind of notice we're now into their kind of space
and we've vibrated the colony around by taking
things off and this and that, but still
it doesn't really bother them,
they're real nice kind of gentle bees, moving
around slowly and not attacking my hand at all,
so these are the bees of Thorah Island.
Paul: Now we're looking through the
mini nucs to cage these queens, find them,
see if they're laying eggs and cage the queens.
We divided up into finders and markers, cagers.
So how you guys doing, you find some queens?
Three women: Yeah.
Paul: Alright this one's done, the lid is turned
upside down it's ready for cell the other two
in the progress of looking through for queens.
We just wanted to see how to open up
these nucs, there is some technique
that really helps to be able to use them
take a little while to learn that,
but Dave is going to open this up and show us.
So you take off the lid, turn it upside down
then turn the box away from him
so the frames are in a more
comfortable position, you'll pry out the cell,
have a look at it, that cell has been hatched
we can see it's been chewed out at the end
here and they're in the process of
starting to break that cell down,
so they're removing that.
So we take that out that helps us give an idea
give us an idea whether there is a queen in this
colony or not.
Looks good so far.
So then Dave is going to pry the frames.
We don't pry against the styrofoam,
we pry against the frame.
The styrofoam boxes aren't very strong so we do it that
way and then we take out the frame
closest to the feeder first, the queen is
most likely to be on that frame.
We'll have a look on one side, look on the
other side there's capped brood,
do you see eggs Dave?
David: Yep.
Paul: Great so game is on, it looks good.
He's going to set that frame down
on the lid just to get it out of the way.
Sometimes the queens get over onto
the boxes and it's helpful if the frames
are all out of the way if the queen is in
on the box itself.
You get through quickly and look for the queen
you'll find her on the frame,
so speed is very helpful here.
So that's three frames out, OK she's on the box.
That's great, now we know that the queen is there
and Dave passes that on to me and
I will mark that queen coming right up here.
So we've got the queen in between
your fingers here you can hold
her top and bottom or side to side
as long as it's on the thorax.
The thorax is quite tough and they can take
a little bit of handling, we get that queen
positioned as high as possible in
our fingers and then we brace our hand
against the other hand so that we can
mark in a very controlled way.
Draw a nice little circle on there
and this year is white, so we've got a white mark on,
close the lid of the paint up quickly
so it doesn't dry out, and then we lift the
right wing since it's an even year
and clip it right where the inside of the
wing changes directions, there's an angle there.
So she's marked and clipped and ready for a cage.
So here we are back putting the queen the cage,
do a little backflip and in she goes.
So we got a queen now we'll put in the
attendants, so we'll take a frame from
that colony that the queen came from and
take some of the bees that she's been
living with and transfer them in.
We put five
worker bees in and we try
to pick the youngest looking bees possible.
If we get stung putting in one of these bees,
that bee will die and she can't take care of the queen
so we're very careful how we put them in
so that they don't die.
There she is, now we need to put in a candy tube.
There's the tube with the candy
and we just push that in the hole here part way
and that gives her food to eat for the
next week as much as a week, but we try
to introduce her as quickly as possible
the acceptance of the queens is better
if they've been freshly caught and
introduced into a new colony.
After harvesting the queens the next step is
to requeen the colony by giving them a
queen cell.
So as you can see we mark the
colony that's done
that's ready for cell by turning the lid
upside down.
Laurie is going to take that lid off
and Dave will come along with the cell.
We've got the incubator in the shade,
you make sure there's space for that cell
to go in and puts it in a way that it's
going to hang well on the frames
and then Brooke is going to pour some sugar syrup
in she pours it nice and slow,
if there's any bees in there that gives an
opportunity to run up and get out of the way
and we'll fill it right up.
Let's do a little bit more Brooke
It's very dry up here and they really need the feed.
Excellent, great
and now Laurie can put the lid back on
and as we've said in some of our other
videos we put that lid down tight
that's important it keeps the queen from
getting into the feeder, we don't want
her drowning in there
and then we just repeat the process
for all of these nucs you see out here
and come back in two weeks,
harvest some more queens,
do this five times this summer
and things can't get much better than that.
So I hope you've enjoyed learning a bit more about
our Buckfast breeding program on Thorah Island.
We hope we're doing Brother Adam
of Buckfast Abby, the originator of this
strain of bees, doing him his name good service here.
We're very proud of our queens and we'll
get right home and get one into a colony
right away.
Thanks a lot for watching. See you another time.
So look at all those beautiful Buckfast bees,
we're taking them home, giving them a good home.
Had a great day up in the island,
things have worked out well,
so what do you say everybody?
Bees!