We are now Selling Bees!
This year we have a limited number of 3 lb package bees for sale. The bees are the same type of bees we use ourselves in some of our host a hive customer locations due to the gentle temperament of the bees, high winter survival rate, great honey production and consistent excellent health of these bees on arrival over the years. For more about the health of our personal bees read this post showing our USDA Honey Bee Health Survey, showing near zero varroa, virus and no disease across all our colonies tested.
What Type of Bee?
I often hear people talking about how one bee type is better than the next. Discussing if they should get Italian, Carniolan, Russians, Buckfast, Mite Biters, VSH, large cell, small cell, treatment free, California bees verses Georgia bees, blah blah blah.
Let me tell you a secret – THERE IS NO MAGIC BEE!™
There is no bee that can make up for bad beekeeping. Frankly, there are sick bees and healthy bees. There are talented beekeepers and those who may need a little help. The latter can cause healthy bees to become sick bees. The secret to successful beekeeping is to start with bees that are healthy in the first place. Bees that are already sick take extremely talented beekeepers to fix, even then some may just be doomed to failure.
How do you get healthy bees?
Unfortunately for many new beekeepers this will be hard to know. The best way is to ensure your bees have a certificate of health and if your bees come with comb (as in a nuc or a hive) be sure they have been inspected by an apiary inspector prior to purchase. If you are buying a package of bees, after they are installed and the queen has been laying for a few weeks, ask your state apiary inspector to inspect them for you and test mite levels. If possible take samples for viruses and disease. They will look at your queens brood pattern to make sure it is healthy and you can find out if your bees have started out on the right path for success. If you can get virus, mite and nosema testing done on the colony this will give you a baseline to judge your bees health.
Our Package Bees
We tested out many bee package suppliers over the past decade and have noted things like which suppliers have better queens, which bees have more mites, which bees have less mites, which come up loaded with virus and which do not. We have found a place we are happy with where the bees historically have been healthier to begin with. These are the bees we are offering to you to purchase. They are only available for local pick as we do not yet ship bees.
Buy Our 3 lb Package Bees Here
