Buckfast Queen Mating Station on Thorah Island Descriptive Transcript 

Summary: The Honey Bee Research Centre team travels to Thorah Island to the Buckfast queen mating station. Paul Kelly, research and apiary manager, is the main speaker. He is joined by David Stotesbury, research and apiary assistant, as well as some other volunteers join him. 

00:00 – 00:15
[Video opens with sky footage of Thorah Island. The text ÒQueen Rearing Buckfast Bees Thorah IslandÓ appears.]

00:15 – 02:55
[Cut to footage of honeybee researchers and volunteers meeting in a parking lot by a dock. They load supplies, including regular and mini nucleus colonies into a boat. The boat leaves the dock and goes to the Thorah Island dock where the supplies are unloaded into the back of a pickup truck. The team travels to the bee yard and unloads all of the supplies.]

02:55 - 03:26
[Cut to Paul Kelly speaking in the bee yard.]

Paul Kelly: 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 Thorah Island and we have different drone lines on each of those islands.

03:27 - 03:58
Paul: 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.

03:58 - 04:30
Paul: So, we have gentle bees and the gentle behaviour 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 behaviour 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.

04:31 - 04:57
Paul: 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.

04:57 - 05:34
Paul: I'd like to introduce a couple of people here that help us out. This is Laurie Simard. [Camera pans over to show Laurie who is standing next to Paul.]

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?

05:34 - 07:07
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.

07:07 - 07:45
[Camera pans back over to Paul.]

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.

07:45 - 08:09
Paul: Going to introduce somebody else here this is Rachel Bryans [Camera pans over to show Rachel standing next to Paul.] 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?

08:09 - 08:51
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.

08:51 - 09:14
Paul: Yeah, that's good. Thanks, Rachel. [Camera pans back over to Paul.] 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.

09:14 - 10:02
[Cut to David Stotesbury standing among some hives in the Thorah Island bee yard.]

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.

10:02 - 10:43
[Camera zooms in on open hive.]

David: 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, [Camera pans up to show David.] so these are the bees of Thorah Island.

10:43 - 11:08
[Cut to Paul speaking in the bee yard among mini nucleus colonies distributed on the ground.]

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. [Camera pans over to three women sitting on boxes working on the mini nucs.] So how you guys doing, you find some queens?

Three women: Yeah.

Paul: Alright this one's done, the lid is turned upside down [refers to one of the mini nucs one of the women is working on] it's ready for cell the other two in the progress of looking through for queens.

11:08 - 11:47
[Cut to footage of Paul in another part of the bee yard.]

Paul: 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. [Camera pans over to David and zooms in on mini nuc.] 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, [Camera zooms in on the cell in David’s hand.] 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. [Paul discards the cell and the camera returns to the mini nuc.

11:47 - 12:11
Paul: 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.

12:11 - 12:46
Paul: He's going to set that frame down on the lid just to get it out of the way. [David removes the second frame and examines it.] 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. [David sets the frame on the lid with the first frame.] You get through quickly and look for the queen [David removes the final frame and examines it.] you'll find her on the frame, [Cut to extreme close-up of frame.] so speed is very helpful here. [Cut back to bee yard. David sets the final frame aside with the others.] 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 [the nuc box] on to me and I will mark that queen coming right up here.

12:46 - 13:43
[Cut to extreme close-up of Paul holding the queen bee.]

Paul: 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 [Paul uses a white marker to draw a circle on the beeÕs abdomen.] 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, [Paul brings a pair of scissors into the frame to clip the beeÕs wing.] 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. [Paul picks up a bee cage.]

13:43 - 14:31
Paul: 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.

14:32 - 14:57
Paul: 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.

14:57 - 15:45
[Cut to Paul standing in the bee yard.]

Paul: After harvesting the queens the next step is to requeen the colony by giving them a queen cell. [Paul walks over to the mini nucleus colonies and kneels down to show one with the lid upside down.] 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.

15:45 - 16:13
Paul: 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.

16:13 - 16:38
[Cut to Paul speaking in the bee yard.]

Paul: 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.

16:38 - 18:00
[Cut to close up of beehive. The text ÒA Honey Bee Research Centre VideoÓ appears.] Video cuts to shot of bee smoker and beehives. The text ÒProduced by David Borish VisualsÓ appears. Cut to overhead photo of bee yard with text “Drone footage by Luke Simard, lukesimard2@gmail.com, www.lukesimard.com.  Cut too footage of queen bee cages being placed in a box. Cut to various shots of bees in the apiary.]

18:00 - 18:12
[Cut to Paul and team sitting in the bee yard. Paul holds a cardboard box with queen bee cages inside.]

Paul: 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?

All: Bees!