On 20 Jan 99, at 9:48, M. C. Michel wrote:
> beat it into the ground, but I differ with the claims of mean buckfast. I
> have found that when a Buckfast queen is replaced, the offspring is
> usually aggressive.  My very best colony last year was a buckfast which
> had been superseded.  The resultant queen was very nice looking.  Her
> colony produced  five full (medium) honey supers.  But wow, mean mean
> mean.  Yesterday I was reminded of their aggressiveness when I could
> hardly see through my veil as they jumped on me.  This year honey not
> withstanding, I'm replacing that queen.
 
Seems to be a common complaint. If you allow Buckfast to superscede
then the chances are "very high" of ending up with aggressive mean
bees, nothing like the mother. For the first time in my 50 years I had to
destroy a hive, they were impossible to work, and they came from a 3rd
generation superscedure Buckfast.
                If you want to run Buckfast either from the South or Canada,
then make sure that they don't superscede. Because of this problem we
have been running some trials of our own and am coming to some (early
as yet) conclusions. Superscedeure or emergency queens are dubious,
but made queens ie from grafted cells breed true and equal to the
mother.
        If I my explain. We had a breeder queen from which we grafted a
good number of cells and queens. That queen suffered an accident,
possibly squished, so we allowed the hive to replace the queen hoping
to maintain the genes. The offspring were terrible, useless, vicious and
lazy. So this year I intend to do more trials to see if I can understand
the problems.
        Brother Adam writes in "Beekeeping at Buckfast Abbey" that he
rarely found good superscedure queens, but then failed to explain why?
                Anyone else with a similar problem?
 
 
 
 
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