I love watching how other beekeepers do things, and this video from Roger Patterson is a cracker. In June 2025 Roger visited a commercial Czech queen breeder and spent time with him at a queen mating station in Austria. Watch the video alongside this post, then come back and see if the same bits stuck with you.
Here’s what stood out to me.
A Czech breeder raising hundreds of queens
The breeder is well respected and raises somewhere between 500 and a thousand queens a year. In the Czech Republic the bees are all supposed to be Carniolan. There was a language barrier, as Roger doesn’t speak Czech and the breeder doesn’t speak English, but Martina translated for them. It’s a nice reminder that beekeeping really is international.
Why use a mating station in Austria?
As Roger understood it, people bring Buckfast bees into the breeder’s own area. That contaminates the local population and makes it hard to keep the Carniolans pure. So most of his queens get mated over the border at a long-established Austrian mating station, which has been going since at least the 1930s.
There are over 2,000 stands there for local beekeepers to bring their mating nucs. Roger’s understanding is that there’s a legal ban on incoming bees within a 10 km radius, though he says that wanted clarifying. Beekeepers pay about €5 per mating nuc, and Roger wasn’t sure if that was per year.
How a busy mating station is worked
This is the part I enjoyed most. It’s quick, tidy and methodical.
The breeder always starts with the yellow nuc on top and the black one underneath, so he never misses one. He opens the nuc, checks for brood, finds the queen and cages her, then rests the lid to one side, which is the normal way with mini nucs. A brick stood on its edge shows the nuc is queenless. A flat brick later shows a queen cell is in.
Replacement queen cells go in about an hour after the queen is taken out. The tip of the cell sits down in the brood nest, and a block goes back on top to show a cell is in. The cells had been in a carrier for about three hours, kept warm by the van. After 10 or 11 days, weather permitting, the new queen should be laying.
Where a nuc turns up queenless without a cell, he takes a frame of brood from another and swaps the comb. And every move goes on a record sheet, so everybody knows where each queen has gone.
Roger also shows one clever bit of kit. His hat stops the queens getting too hot.
Calm bees, no veils
A customer from Poland arrived to collect 37 queens, which he’s taking home to raise more queens for local beekeepers. Neither he nor the breeder wore any protective clothing. Roger points out that the bees really are calm, and that’s presumably why the Polish beekeeper wants them.
Commercial beekeepers have our problems too
I like Roger’s closing point. Commercial beekeepers face the same issues as the rest of us. This breeder gets failures and drone layers. But he has one problem we don’t, which is bee eaters. They arrive towards the end of July and take the drones. And with about two queens going through a nuc each year, his pitch costs him around €2 per queen.
Roger thanks the breeder for his hospitality, and says he didn’t hold anything back all week. That comes across in the footage.
If you’re interested in raising your own queens, it’s well worth twenty minutes of your time. For more, have a look at the BIBBA website.