Nucleus Colony Give Away: A free prize draw

This draw is now closed and we have a winner!

The winner is... Chris from Frome
Congratulations to Chris

I am planning to run a similar event in the run up to Easter 2020, this will be open for just a week or two prior to the Easter weekend, so subscribe to this site for details
(desk top view is easier! or click Here)

I am offering the chance of a free five frame nucleus colony headed by one of my Local/AMM 2020 queens.

The winner will be selected at random on 20th December 2019.

You should be a beekeeper or have recently completed a beginners course and if you are the winner you should be able to collect the nucleus from Crewe, Cheshire in the UK. (I don't post or ship nucleus colonies).

The colony will be ready for collection by the winner in July, or earlier if weather conditions are favourable.

To enter the draw, simply complete the form: This draw is now closed
Good Luck!

Are Native Bees Productive?

AMM colony split down at the start of the season

I purchased a couple of Irish AMM queens last year to use as breeder queens. They both came trough the winter well in double six frame nucs and then expanded into double BBs. When it came time to super up I decided to break one of them down into nucs, I only wanted to graft from these queens after all. This queen I put into a nuc with two frames, the rest foundation, took it home and left to build up. The other I supered  up as normal.

The result:

The colony that was kept together currently has four supers on.

The broken down colony quickly expanded into two BBs, I then put a BB on as a super and I have just had to put another super on as they have almost filled the other with honey.

One of the early daughter queens (from last year) has two BB supers and three supers.

Who said that AMMs aren’t productive? I’m really rather pleased with them.

Selecting Breeder Queens, yellow or dark?

I am primarily trying to breed dark, near native bees and have managed to make reasonable progress although most colonies have some workers with yellow banded abdomens. Considering I'm based in Cheshire which has a large number of beekeepers, many of which purchase Buckfast bees, this isn't a great surprise.

Dark, local bees, these were sold to a gent that I was mentoring a few seasons ago. They were very docile and produced a honey surplus in their first year.

I have over the last five years bred as many queens as I was able to with the equipment I had available, trying different methods of queen rearing, selecting desirable stock and culling the least desirable.

A Buckfast swarm caught just a mile from my apiary

However, I have a yellow queen (she's marked yellow too, 2017) that has provided me with brood frames and bees to make up a large number of nucs, bees for Apideas and produced a honey crop each year that has surpassed all of my other colonies. In addition the colony is very calm on the comb, the bees just don't seem to realize that they are being scrutinized. As far as I recall I have had no stings from this colony either BUT they are (the workers) 40% yellow. Last year and this I had ear marked her as "break up into nucs" but she (the queen) just keeps on giving, what to do ......

Nucleus colonies ready to go

This spring, feeling that I should repay the dept, I deciding to graft from this very productive and un-swarmy queen. I didn't want to use up a lot of resources so I chose to use the remains of a strong colony on double BB from which I had taken a nuc from to donate to my association apiary as a cell raiser. I put in seven grafts, four of which took and subsequently went on to produce laying queens. The last of these went on to their new owners today, these last two were on four frames last Friday in a "Twinstock type" nuc double from cornishhoney.co.uk. When I transferred them into their sales nucs on Sunday they had built the fifth frame out and the queens had laid in them. They were all as calm on the frame as their mother's colony, hopefully they will continue to be so as they expand and grow with their new keepers.

A twist in the tail:
This colony, having been a dream to work with is currently on a double BB with five supers, finally decided to let me down: I inspected them this Sunday, There were a couple of sealed swarm cells and more unsealed, luckily my yellow queen had been clipped and was still resident. She was easily transferred to a nucleus along with another emerging brood frame plus bees (WITH NO QUEEN CELLS: this is important!!) and a frame of stores. She will hopefully come back into lay and build up up the strength of the new colony.

So what to do now? We are told to "go with the bees". So my plan is to use the now queen less colony as a cell raiser in two cycles, one to raise more queens from one of my Irish queens, transferring them to cell finishers and then raising more queens from this industrious yellow queen.

The original colony obviously have their minds set on raising queen cells, so I will set them up and let them do their thing: Rear queens! I'll overwinter the resulting queens as nucs, using them in the spring to replace winter losses, nuc building or, if the winter is kind, sell any surplus in the spring.

I'll post some more pics here as we go through this process.

Honeybee Genetics

Genetics take some getting your head around. The processes of meiosis and mitosis are not easily understood, for me at least. I'll try to explain how honey bee genetics works in a simple way and to explain how understanding it can help in our bee breeding.

Chromosomes are the structures that contain the genes of an organism. Bees have about 15,000 genes. Most animals normally have two sets of chromosomes. One set comes from the mother and one from the father. They are called diploid. Di means two, and ploid stands for chromosome.

Queens and worker bees have 32 chromosomes, 16 from the mother (via the egg) and 16 from the sperm with which the egg is fertilised. Drones are produced from unfertilised eggs. They do not receive a sperm cell when their egg is laid. This means that they only have half the number of chromosomes (16 rather than 32). They are then said to be haploid, from the Greek haploos, single.

Each egg laid by the queen will be unique due to chromosomal cross over during meiosis. Simply put, the genes are mixed. The potential number of possible combinations is huge. Every daughter (worker or daughter queen) will be genetically different from her sisters. Each egg receives half of the queen's 32 chromosomes, she can therefore only pass on half of her genes to her (daughter) offspring. 

Drones, as we have said, are produced from unfertilised eggs, their genetic make up is 100% from their mother. Each drone will still be unique, due to the chromosomal crossover over of their mother's genes. All sperm cells produced by an individual drone will be identical, genetic clones. The drone only has 16 chromosomes, each sperm cell must carry 16 chromosomes, so each sperm cell has 100% of this genetic material.

When selecting colonies to breed from we generally breed from our best queen, which makes sense! However when selecting colonies to rear drones from we must remember that drones develope from unfertilised eggs. Their genes come from the mating of their grandmother, not their mother! Not easy the get your head around but it does make sense if you've understood the above. It is therefore essential to keep accurate records for queen and drone rearing.

We can use this knowledge to selectively breed our honey bees. A colony (or colonies) with desirable traits can be used to rear a large number of daughter queens. The sperm cells from the drones produced by this new generation of queens will carry only genes from the original (desirable) queen. For example, if we aquire say a 100% AMM queen (we are interested in native bees after all), raise lots of daughter queens from her and encourage them to raise drones (here), we can use these colonies in isolated mating apiaries or select only drones from these to carry out artificial insemination to give us 50% AMM - 50% hybrid bees. By repeating the process, taking larvae from the 50% pure AMM colonies and mating with the drones from the daughter queens (100% AMM drones) the next generation will now be 75% AMM. For the following generation 87.5%, the next 93.75, then 96.9%, 98,4%, 99.2% and so on. Starting with bees that are part AMM will mean we start off at a higher percentage.

This technique of line or inbreeding can be used to fix a number of desirable traits not just race. We have to be aware though that there are consequences of using this technique as well as advantages.

This queen is a daughter of an Irish AMM queen.  She was raised in  2019. She was open mated away from my main apiary so her worker daughters are a mix of yellow and dark but she will produce 100% AMM drones for the main mating apiary.

The sting in the tail
There is another aspect of honeybee genetics that we should be aware of, sex determination. Whether an individual is male or female is different in honey bees than in mammals. We have seen above that males are produced when the queen lays an unfertilised egg, there is a little more to it though.

There is a gene that determines the sex of bees. There are different alleles, or versions, of this gene. If the allele from the mother (egg) is different to that from the father (sperm) the bee will be female. If they are the same the bee will be male.

Normal Drones. An unfertilised egg will, having only one sex allele, develope as a normal male/drone. There is only one allele and so cannot be different.

Diploid drones. Males can develope from fertilised eggs if the egg and the sperm both have the same sex allele. These drones will not be viable, they contian 32 chromosomes and will not function as a normal male. Worker bees will remove these diploid drones when the egg hatches. The holes left in the brood area result in a pepper pot brood pattern. The worst effects are seen in inbreeding. A brother sister mating will yield only 50% viable brood.

The chances of the two sex alleles being the same are normally low, there are twenty plus versions of the allele at least (I think I have read somewhere that there are over fifty?). By inbreeding the odds of the two alleles being the same become much higher. If we continue to breed from the same closely related group of bees, as in the above example, we will have weak colonies that are suseptable to disease and pests.

We could start with a large population and manage different breeding lines, raising drones from one line each year and alternating in subsequent years. Working in groups with other beekeepers helps here, a larger breeding population will better mainatian genetic diversity.

Also from time to time we can introduce new genetic material by bringing in new queens.

I hope that was a reasonably clear explanation of honeybee genetics and how we can use to select the colonies that we should breed from.

Cell builder, grafting larvae

I have read many books, articles, blogs and watched countless internet videos on queen rearing. While this is very worthwhile it can become mind boggling. The different methods become blurred and confused. I think that if you want to rear queens and to develop onto bee breeding, you should choose a method, research that method and give it a try. That is to say a few attempts, rarely does a single attempt produce the results show the true potential that can be attained. Lessons can be learned from failure and successes built upon. Then by all means move onto try another method.

I found a number of videos that I found fascinating and informative, Even before I actually had any bees myself. These were on the National Honey Show's YouTube channel. They had invited Mike Palmer from North America to speak. There are a few videos if his talks on their channel, one of these in particular I have watched over and over, this his talk on Queen Rearing in the Sustainable Apiary, Link I decided to base my queen rearing on the method that Mike describes.

Inorder to raise queen cells the cell raiser needs to be strong in numbers of bees, with a high number of young nurse bees and to be congested, that is packed with bees, so many that it seems that there is hardly enough room in the cell raiser to accommodate them all. The video describes how to prepare a colony to be a cell raiser by adding frames of sealed brood to an already strong colony and then to split what has now become a colony that is ready to swarm into a separate cell raiser and a queen right "half" that can be reunited after queen rearing.
After this manipulation of the colony to produce the hopelessly queenless cell raiser, it should be left for a few hours for the bees to realise that they have no queen or larvae with which to raise another queen.

Hopelessly queenless

Packed with bees

Most recently I have used Cupkit cell cups to graft into. On a sunny day with contact lenses and reading glasses too, I can graft quite quickly in the apiary using a stainless steal grafting tool. This takes practice but it's well worth putting in the time. Use whatever vision aids that you need to be able to see young larvae (<12 hours old). These are smaller than eggs! Again there are many videos available on the internet to guide you but practice and trial and error are essential. Success in takes are variable, I have had from 10 - 80% initial takes but have had cells that were initially started only to be taken down by the bees before being sealed. This can be reduced by removing started cells, transferring them to cell finishers. I have not done this yet but plan to do so next season after watching videos posted by Richard Noel Link who has posted some very informative and entertaining videos.

Ten days after grafting it is time to harvest the ripe queen cells, these can be used in a number of ways. I introduce them into either full size framed nucs or Apideas.

Apideas to be transported to the mating apiary.

These are then taken to the mating apiary, where there are colonies of selected desirable bees producing lots of healthy drones with which my new queens can mate. I want to raise healthy, docile, productive near native (AMM) bees but you decide what qualities that you want from your future queens!

Nucs and Apideas in the mating apiary

Queen cells can be checked for emergence a few days later, the queen cell removed and the colony quickly closed and left for the queen to be mated, the nuc then checked for a mated laying queen. This can take 2-3 weeks in the case of full sized nucs but often the queen in an Apidea will begin to lay after about 12 days usually, much sooner than her sisters mating from a full size nuc or hive.

Virgin queens have emerged from these cells

A new queen!

With luck you will have new queens from your own stock that will go onto hopefully, to reward your efforts with gentle colonies that are a pleasure to work, give a good honey crop and give you a great deal of satisfaction. The queen in the above picture gave me my biggest  honey crop in 2018 but unfortunately wasn't as easy to work as I'd hoped! She did her bit though and although I thank her for that she will not be part of next years breeding programme.