BBKA Forum

British Beekeepers Association Official Forum 

  • What have you done today bee-related?

  • General Q&A, Bee chat and only Bee chat please
General Q&A, Bee chat and only Bee chat please
 #4484  by Japey Edge
 13 Aug 2019, 09:15
Alfred wrote:
13 Aug 2019, 07:37
BSHoneybees at Cheltenham are good guys .They were also out of bucks but did have carlonian last time I needed one.Ive done mail order and self collect from them and they've been great .
Cheers Alfred, I'll have a look. I'm thinking more toward Carniolan due to the Buckfast second generation aggressiveness thing. Admittedly I haven't done a great deal of research yet.
 #4489  by NigelP
 13 Aug 2019, 16:23
F2 aggression....it happens in some areas and doesn't in others. Doesn't matter if you use Buckfast, Carniolan, Italian etc .
The depends is what the local bees/drones are like temperament wise.
Its not the fault of the decent genetics you bought, but the fault of the local bees whose genetics you have no control over.
If you buy an station/island mated Buckfast queen she and her sperm are 100% Buckfast (same applies to carnies etc).
Call this the F0 generation.
Now her offspring (and queens) will be still be pure 100% Buckfast as all her sperm is Buckfast but the daughters now open mate with local drones so the offspring of the F1 queen are now 50% Buckfast 50% Local.
Next generation the Buckfast genes get diluted even further so now you have offspring that are 75% local and only 25% Buckfast and this is is often when the "aggression" starts to show through".

F0 queen is 100% Buckfast Her daughters are 100% Buckfast
F1 queen is 100% Buckfast but her sperm is now local and thus all her daughters are now 50% Buckfast and 50% local (These are the ones you usually buy)
F2 queen is 50% Buckfast, 50% Local but her daughters will be 75% locla and 25% Buckfast
F3 Just about back to local bee population

All you can do is try it and see what happens......
 #4492  by NigelP
 13 Aug 2019, 17:22
Station or Island mated queens are queen matings that occur in areas where both the drones and queens allowed to mate there are tightly controlled. So the outcome is as certain as it can be. i.e the drones are Italian only and the queens are Italian only (can be anything. Lots of them on the continent, I know of only one in the UK. . They are isolated areas where no random drones can wander in....unlike the UK where in 99.9% of matings we have no control over where the drones come from. Breeding in this country is like tossing a coin.

The F's just represent generation numbers downstream of where you started from. As long as you define the starting population it doesn't really matter if you call them F1's or F0's.#
i,e 1st queen =F0, her daugher queens are the next generation are F1's , In turn their daughters are further away and so F2 and so on.
 #4495  by Chrisbarlow
 13 Aug 2019, 22:03
Making up nucs for overwintering.
 #4497  by Japey Edge
 14 Aug 2019, 07:25
Thanks for clarifying that Nigel - it certainly makes sense. From what I had read all the warnings were about Buckfast so I thought there was something crazy happening if their genes are tampered with. If it's just a matter of local drone genetics mixing in and their personality coming through then I'm back to being happy with any breed of queen providing she makes the colony calm and productive.

Need to figure out a plan of action on how I'm going to replace this problem queen.
 #4498  by Chrisbarlow
 14 Aug 2019, 07:36
Japey Edge wrote:
14 Aug 2019, 07:25
Need to figure out a plan of action on how I'm going to replace this problem queen.
You could just kill her and merge her with another box of bees.
 #4501  by Japey Edge
 14 Aug 2019, 13:31
Chrisbarlow wrote:
14 Aug 2019, 07:36
Japey Edge wrote:
14 Aug 2019, 07:25
Need to figure out a plan of action on how I'm going to replace this problem queen.
You could just kill her and merge her with another box of bees.
Hi Chris - could you expand on that a little bit please?
 #4504  by Chrisbarlow
 14 Aug 2019, 14:37
You've got a problem queen in a hive. She's nasty for instance.

You have another colony near by and they are nice.

How to merge together...

Go into nasty colony, find queen and kill her. Check colony to make sure no 2nd queen is running round in there as well. You just never know.

The nice queen colony, remove roof and crown board and put a single sheet of newspaper on top of it, straight onto the frames, something that covers the whole top of the box. A nice broad sheet. If you must use a trashy tabloid you might need two sheets but that's ok. Then make some slashes in the paper, small in size and small in number.

Some folk also squirt in air freshener under the paper, your call.

Now take your queenless nasty queen colony , you just need the boxes and frames and bees, leave the floor , crown board and roof behind and put it on top of the boxes with the nice queen inside.

Put crown board and roof back on again.

Leave it alone for a week

A miracle hopefully has happened and the originally two colonies have become one headed by the nice queen


This is all about meeting two colonies together without them fighting each other and you choose which queen survives

Hope this help

Kind regards Chris
  • 1
  • 60
  • 61
  • 62
  • 63
  • 64
  • 301