NEVER CAGED, BANKED OR SHIPPED
1. Confinement to a shipping cage for even just a few hours negatively affects a queen's pheromone production, body weight and egg laying
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2. Banked queens shut down their pheromone production, shrivel up inside, must be carefully nurtured back to full strength, and can suffer physical injuries from workers while banked​
3. Shipped queens can be exposed to extreme high and low temperatures, which can cause reduce a queen's fecundity, even if she herself survives ​​
No wonder a caged-banked-shipped queen can't compete with an actively laying queen, from the bees' perspective.​​
A Potomac River Queen is never caged, banked or shipped. Instead, she comes with "the frame of brood she is on, bees and all, together with another frame from the same hive," inspired by the favorite queen introduction method of G.M. Doolittle, the father of modern commercial queen rearing.
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This simple, cage-free method works. "I do not lose one queen out of fifty," Mr. Doolittle wrote. ​
how we select breeder queens
1. Locally Adapted: Our bees live here. Year round. The core of our stock has been here in the Ridge and Valley Appalachians since 2017, and we don't move our bees to California, Georgia or anywhere else, so our breeder queens must thrive here
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2. Productive and Gentle: our breeder queen colonies must produce surplus honey/brood -- and not be unusually defensive
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3. Treatment-Free Survivors: our breeder queen colonies must successfully overwinter in the presence of varroa mites and without chemical treatments
4. Hygienic: our breeder queen colonies must demonstrate hygienic traits by getting a high Harbo score (3 or 4)
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