Buckfast queens

[charliesnike]

I'm going to purchase buckfast queens from Denmark.The bees I have at the minute are really vicious.The guy has advised me to purchase random mated buckfast queens this year so that I would have buckfast drones next year and then introduce pure bred queens next year.Anybody got any ideas about this?What would I end up with if I introduced virgen queens next year.

[Michael Bush]

Back when everyone in the US was "Italianizing" their apiaries, this was a common strategy.  If you have pure blooded queens that are open mated with unknown drones, the thing you can count on is that their drones (which are only haploid) are the same genetics as the queen (unfertilized eggs), rather than the drones she mated with.  So you now have a lot of the genetics you want in the drones, even if half the workers are other genetics.  Now if you graft from a fairly pure blooded queen you have better odds of her mating with the drones you want...

But Buckfasts have always been a sort of a breed and a sort of a hybrid.  Brother Adam was always bringing in new stock and crossing things in very particular ways.  Breeding queens from Buckfast queens is not as predictable as breeding queens from Italians or Carniolans.  That said, I did breed queens from Buckfasts all the time and was pleased with the outcome most of the time.