Great information! Not many people at all talk about queen longevity, longevity is what we have to get back to, not this requeen every year stuff etc. Much respect for honest opinions and saying the truth, even if some don’t want to look for better answers or open their eyes to information or refuse to consider something different. My opinion is we must keep diversity going and expand it, we must get back to like the 1970’s diversity levels in the wild population, the bee keepers can keep what ever stock they want. We must work on places where there are no bee keepers and help put diversity back in the feral population in locations. My opinion is take some of those good colonies that may be swarmey and let them live in places that no one keeps bees, and also add these hygienic bees, over time we will have great feral bees with that great diversity we once had about everywhere. Last, thank you for your work over the years. I myself have been looking, researching, for better ways to keep bees (10 years plus) and I finally feel with your work (bees) and different ways of keeping bees that not many bee keepers do, I can now start to have a few hundred hives and not waste my time, my money, on doing what everyone else is doing. I want to change the way I will keep bees and take one part from the way some keep bees and turn it into a more natural method of keeping bees and so I don’t “have to treat”bees. I believe my different thinking and different designs can change some ways we keep bee for pollination etc. My opinion is, there is a lot of better basic ways we should be keeping bees but 99% of bee keepers don’t. It’s the little things that together adds up for better result IMO. I feel 99% of bee keepers don’t do what the old fathers of bee keeping did, just basic things. Yes, keep bees however you want, but many basic things have been changed over hundreds of years and we all need to go back to a lot of those basics. The f you have to ask what they are, then you need to do some research or ask. (It comes back to keep it simple stupid) Man changed the honey bee, IMO we need to change back to the more natural ways, and it’s the little things that will add up with our new knowledge we have today of the honey bee. Look at the all the research that can be now done and has been done, what we have learned about the bee, if we rethink the old and the new together we can perhaps have a lot better and healthy bees. (X and FB -Marc Woodburn & J&J Engineering for my different thinking and more off the way thinking)
I really appreciate your experience and your efforts and your willingness to share your info so I'm very grateful! One question I have is how do you find the time to do Harbo assays on all your colonies to ensure they all have the VSH trait?
Cory, glad to see you getting back to doing some interview videos! We need to look at the Russian Bee Breeders Association's model for keeping genetic diversity with the VSH lines.
i am a first year . I only have 5 hives in East Tennessee and ordered the UBO on the initial offering to test my colonies this coming spring. Great talk
Cory, I wanted to thank you again for such a great discussion! I really enjoyed it! My favorite line of yours is “Stop buying trash queens and alot of your problems go away”😂😂😂😂
You nailed it Cory, scheduling Queen pre-sales and coordination of shipping of Queen is always a challenge. Than you have mother nature that is in control. “Queen producer life!” lol. Good chat my friend, we will see you at the expo bro🤙
Cory queens are the greatest! I ordered 20 virgins last spring and got them mated with my Russian drones. These boxes are now double deeps with a high propolis use! Can't wait to see what makes it through winter so I can UBO them in spring to see which will be my new queen breeder for 2024! Keep up the good work Cory, hope to get more of your queens to place in one of my other apiaries in N.C.
Sharing queens in a co-op is exactly what the Russian Quuen Breeders Association does each year. You probably already know this. They have uniform criteria to select from but they share their mated queens as breeder queens each year and they don't graft from their own queens for resale each year. Their co-op members can change slightly each year if they don't align with their pre-set criteria, but they stick with this process.
2:20 This is where you go from managing bees to managing people. It's what drives me crazy during nuc selling season. This coming year I'm not taking deposits for that very reason you outline.
On the second Spring criteria mentioned Relative to strong build up,do you go ahead and kill the queens that have slow build up and combine the bees with other hives? Or, move those hives out of that area?
I'm sure that you have covered this before, but how would you recommend I build the strongest builder I can and what do you anticipate the ideal time of spring / summer to set up my builder and graft? Thanks Brady James
I use large colonies that are already triggered to swarm. Then I don’t have to build a builder, just utilize one. 😎 When the bees want to make queens, it’s go time.
