how we select breeder queens
1. Regionally Adapted
2. Productive and Gentle
3. Hygienic and High Quality
Regionally Adapted
Productive and Gentle
Hygienic and High Quality
As beekeeping legend Randy Oliver puts it,"[t]here is no biological reason to expect bees bred for early queen production in subtropical areas to perform well during northern winters (or vice versa). And there is plenty of evidence that locally-adapted breeds fare better on the local flora, and deal better with local pathogens. [F]or non-migratory beekeepers, locally-adapted stock generally performs best[, and thus, i]deally, we would have queen breeders producing mite-resistant stock for every ecoregion in the map above." We agree.
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Our bees live here -- year round. The core of our stock has spent many winters here in the Ridge and Valley Appalachians (EPA ecoregion 67), tucked between the generally higher, more rugged Allegheny Mountains to the west and Blue Ridge Mountains to the east. Forests cover about 50% of the land, and there is great diversity of aquatic habitats. Just south of the 40th parallel north, we are barely far enough south to overwinter bees outdoors, according to the common wisdom of a century ago.
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Cities in our ecoregion include Harrisburg, Carlisle, Chambersburg, Altoona and State College, PA to the north; Winchester, Front Royal and Harrisonburg, VA to the south; and many in between, from Hagerstown to Cumberland, MD, and Martinsburg, Charles Town and Romney, WV.
We need productive bees that love to create surplus honey and brood. Otherwise, our sister company, Sleepy Creek Honey, would become an expensive beekeeping hobby. To that end, we go to our best honey-producing yards and select drone colonies and breeder queens from colonies with exceptional overwintering ability and strong spring build-up. If a hive is unusually defensive, that queen does not make the grade.
Hygienic
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Some colonies are (way) better than others at detecting pheromones emitted by unhealthy brood, a.k.a., unhealthy brood odor ("UBO"). Optera's UBeeO is a new test that allows us to measure a colony's hygienic response to UBO.
Research shows that "colonies capable of uncapping ≥60% of UBeeO-treated cells in a 2-hour, early-season test have significantly lower Varroa infestations at the end of the summer and are significantly more likely to survive winter compared with lower-scoring colonies."
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The image on the left above is before UBeeO testing one of our breeders, and the image on the right is after the bees had 2 hours to react (or not) to the unhealthy odor. The bees uncapped much more than 60% of the cells.
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To be included in our breeding pool, a queen must have a UBeeO score ≥60% -- and/or a score of 3 or 4 on the Harbo assay scale of 0-4.
A Harbo score of 4 means that the colony fully expresses the Varroa Sensitive Hygiene (VSH) trait.
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A Harbo score of just 2 "produces an acceptable level of resistance to varroa, enough to control mite populations." (p.19 of linked handbook)
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High Quality
We do not sell any mated queens younger than 21 days old. Research shows that giving a queen at least 21 days to mature leads to increased introduction success, early survival and satisfactory performance. Using an underage queen is just asking for trouble.
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Our queens have been third-party tested. NC State University's Honey Bee Queen and Disease Clinic gave high quality scores to a sample of our late-season 2023 queens -- an A for size (weight, head width and thorax width), and an A- for insemination quality (total sperm, sperm viability and spermatheca % filled).
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Our pool of 2024 breeder queens included instrumentally-inseminated Carniolans from Latshaw Apiaries, a renowned breeder of healthy honeybees.