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If you are happy to move the queen to another colony as soon as she starts laying, they're probably as good as any other mini-nuc. However, there is a risk that she'll be rejected. Far better to buy a larger nuc and allow her to develop a proper sealed worker brood pattern. Then you know that...

You could always wrap a piece of tinfoil around them (leaving the tip exposed) if you're worried about them being torn down.

Are you casting nasturtiums about your ancestry? ;)

Although swarming/aggression is related to inbreeding in the queen or her workers

You're almost right: the F1 queen is a product of it's parents mating. Not the local drones. These impact the quality of her workers. So, the queen and her drones are a product of the queens parents. If you control the mating using island mating stations or instrumental insemination, you have...

Hybrid vigour is only a thing when you are talking about crossing two inbred lines.

As a breeder, I would never raise F2's. The most I would ever do is F1 and that is only because the drones are haploid and receive all 16 chromosomes from their mother. The situation becomes more complex in subsequent generations but, generally speaking, the effect is to dilute whatever you...

The problem with this question is that there is no objective scale. Everyone will answer from their own perspective If they're used to Buckfast, they'll tend to answer positively. Not because the bees are any better, or worse, than they were originally, but, because they've made an investment in...

I don't think she needed your help Dani. Her sisters were there to help and they're hygienic This is NL-55-35-31-2020 - a daughter of NL-55-3-8-2018 mated to C-VarroaToleranz line drones from the Kirchhain Bee Institute DE-7-45-363-2017 on the German island of Norderney last summer.

I've been doing some hygiene testing today The first clip is a bee doing it's thing while I was looking for purple-eyed brood The second clip is just as I had finished marking the sample area Unfortunately, the file-size is too big to post here so I put them on Twitter EDIT: I put the first...

I haven't really kept a track of it but I'd guess at 1-2 per series. The way I'd put it is if you have a couple left that haven't emerged, candle them and see if they're likely to. It's probably not worth doing it on every cell.

Yes. They're LED so the light is cool and won't cause any problems.

@Brian Bush is leading an effort to improve his local mongrel. To that end, he already has 10 full-sister queens (daughters of NL-55-35-15-2020) in mating nucs from a grafting session in my apiary on 13th June. I grafted 20 larvae from NL-55-35-31-2020 last night and Brian took them back to his...

It may be that there are warmer/cooler spots in your incubator. What sort of incubator do you have? Does it have fans to circulate the air and prevent hot spots? I use a Brinsea Ova-Easy with the humidity option (Advance EX model). It is all controlled by the panel on the front. Even so, I have...

It seems so. Here is one supplier but I suppose there must be others.

Years ago, I went on a course to learn how to make skeps properly. I came back enthusiastic about making my own, bought all the stuff and it sat in the garage...for 20+years

I'm curious why you call them "German" black mongrels. The commonly held belief is that Amm dominated the whole of western Europe. Were they killed/re-introduced into Finland?

Yes. I have seen them many times too. I bought the DVDs when they first came out back in the 80's/90's. I have even bought books on breeding (in German) that weren't available in English wherever I thought I might learn something new. Of course, I had to put a bit of effort into translating them...

You can always learn from the past, even if it is only to see how far things have changed.

There don't seem to be as many around yet but I have seen a couple.