- Hi, there!
We're here today to talk about breeding gentle bees.
We work with a strain of bees called Buckfast bees developed by Brother Adam at Buckfast
Abbey.
We've implemented his system of breeding bees and one part of that system is selecting bees
for gentle behavior.
We're gonna open up two hives, this one here and another one in behind that exhibit opposite
extremes here.
This is a really nice one and the other one, we've got this hive from another beekeeper
and it's got a little bit more aggression.
I don't want to show too wide of difference there, because, you know, that's fairly obvious.
We want to see the subtleties in selecting for gentle behavior.
First, let's talk a little bit about how we can use this to our advantage.
We found with our research that the gentle behavior, or defensiveness, of the colony
is inherited from the male side.
So, the drones are really important in this equation.
And knowing that we can make good use of that information by managing our colonies in a
way that we're getting, making sure that our queens are mating with drones from gentle
colonies.
One method of doing that is by having colonies isolated on islands.
But, most people don't have access to an island and they're dealing with, in their own bee
yards, trying to breed for gentle behavior.
It's quite possible to do that through something called drone flooding.
And that means you're trying to provide more drones in the area where your queens are going
to be mating that are coming from other hives, other neighbor beekeeper hives, or wild colonies.
So, what we do exemplifies that.
We do all our mating, all our local mating, in our home bee yard.
Because our home bee yard is surrounded by other out apiaries and within our, the flight
range of the queen.
What we don't do is do mating in one of our out yards that's near the edge of our so called
'territory' because that would mean that our queens are flying out of our range of our
drones and are mating with other drones from other colonies.
The gentle behavior makes, obviously makes colonies much nicer to work with.
But, I personally feel that it's our responsibility as beekeepers to keep gentle colonies.
So, if we see any aggression in any hives, we immediately requeen those colonies and
that does two things, it means that our bees are good neighbors and it also means that
those colonies aren't producing drones that then are kind of a genetic pollution in our
local drone pool.
If, if they're not there to mate with our queens and that aggression does not get passed
on.
So, let's have a look at a couple colonies and we'll see what we're looking for when
we go through colonies to select them to use for our drone mother colonies or to graft
from to produce the queens that we rear.
So, we'll have a look at this hive.
I'm getting my smoker, make sure it's going, but we don't actually use it, at least, initially.
We open up, we open up the hive.
We take the super off. and, when you're touching these colonies, you need to make sure your
behavior is, your management technique, is perfect.
That's the only way it's possible to compare one hive to another.
If we bump one hive and then are gentle with another then that's obviously gonna give us
a false impression.
So, we hold the hive bodies down as we pry up so nothing snaps free and we move slowly.
And that won't set the bees off.
Looking down here, I can see that the bees are very still and that's really characteristic
of gentle colonies.
Very little running around.
So, looking down here the bees are quite still.
Just a little bit of movement around.
No flight up towards a rapid motions like that.
That's another good test.
Now, what we'll do is we'll take a frame out and we do the same inspection on each colony.
Take three frames out and observe the behavior of the bees on the comb.
We've already seen the behavior of the bees on top of the frames, so now we're gonna look
at it on the comb.
So, this is a honey frame.
Bees moving very slowly there.
We'll take a closer look at a brood frame.
So, this frame here has lots of open brood on it and we'll just have a closer look at
those bees on the phone there.
They're very still.
Just moving slightly around.
There's no running.
There's no clumping up and that's the behavior that we're looking for in gentle colonies.
So, that's called comb stability.
We'll take that frame and put it down in, and we'll have a look at another frame.
This one we've got lots of capped brood on it and, again, you'll see that very calm behavior.
Almost not moving.
You wonder how they're getting any work done.
We're now gonna move on to the next colony and have a look at it.
Now we're over at the more aggressive of the two hives.
There are bees already around my face.
Zooming around.
That's, I got the smoke going around my face here.
I'm gonna open up the hive and do the same inspection.
So, we'll just set the smoker aside, take the super off.
Again, we're using our good beekeeping technique of not snapping things free.
We'll set that super down there.
And just looking down in here, I can see bees running around.
I'm a little nervous about these bees actually because they are much more aggressive.
So, we'll just pull that up carefully.
And then, just looking down at the top bars, we can see bees moving around a lot more.
We'll pull a frame out so we can see the comb stability, or lack thereof, in this case.
I'll just hold that up so we can see up close there.
The bees are much more jittery on the comb.
Moving around this way and that.
But I notice even more than that, bees flying to my movements and threatening to sting.
So, we'll just set that back in there.
I'm gonna use the smoker now.
I've done all the looking I need to on this hive.
We will requeen this colony at the first opportunity.
Later this week actually.
We'll pinch the queen and introduce a mated queen with good, gentle genetics.
I feel that it's our responsibility as beekeepers to keep gentle hives.
They make better neighbors and we're not contributing negative genetics into our local gene pool.
We encourage beekeepers to share stock in their local community from gentle colonies
so that all their colonies are producing drones with that good, gentle genetics.
Thanks for watching!
Enjoy your bees!