Queen Production
2024 Prices Queens 1-49 $35.00 each plus shipping
50+ $30.00 each plus shipping
For orders call /text Jen @ 701-388-1178 or email us at dwapairy@gmail.com
I learned how to raise queens from Gene Sager from Wheaton, MN back in 1994. Gene was a foreman for the JZBZ company back in the 70’s. JZBZ invented the plastic queen cell cups that everyone in the industry uses. I also prefer to use the plastic queen cages they invented. I worked for Gene for 2 springs down in SE Texas (Jasper) before going 100% solo on the queen rearing bit in 1997. Hands on training is the best way to learn beekeeping. Back in the day, I ran 1000 colonies by myself and ran 800 mating nucs. We were basically focused on honey production 100%, with selling 1500-2000 mated queens for extra money. As cheap foreign honey started to pour into the US in the late 90’s and early 2,000’s and drove our prices down we decided to run a few hundred more hives, pollinate almonds with one load of bees, and run another 400 mating nucs. I did this mostly solo, but with hiring part time help for harvest and having our honey custom extracted. This worked fine, until it became harder to keep the bees alive and spending 3 months in Texas was no longer good enough. Today, I spend almost 7 months in Texas or driving back and forth to Minnesota. We bought a place down in Newton, TX in fall of 2017. Our whole family moved down after Christmas and the kids went to school in Newton until Covid in 2020. Over the next few years we picked up 3 H2A workers. As beekeeping bees became more labor intensive and time consuming, we picked up 2 more workers. Today, we run a little over 2,000 colonies for honey production, graft 25,000 queen cells, produce 4500 mated queens, and fill 1500 hives and starter hives for other beekeepers.
We prefer to run a darker bee than most people. In the past, we ran Homer Park Italians. Then we started working in Minnesota Hygienic stock into our outfit in the mid 2000’s. Around 2010-2012, I started working in Carniolan stock from Sue Cobey. I prefer an Italian/Carni cross. They seem to prefer well in a single brood chamber without swarming, fly in cooler weather, and give me a little longer brood-less period for killing varroa mites in a calendar year. They love to draw out wax and are big honey producers. The last few years, I’ve acquired Carniolan and Caucasian stock from Megan Mahoney.
In addition to buying breeding stock from other beekeepers, we select from our own hives as well. We start by picking out 50-60 hives that catch our eye. We monitor them for honey population size, gentleness, hygienic testing protocol, winter survivability, and importantly honey production. Any selected hive that does not make 50 pounds of honey more than the other hives in the yard, or at least 150-175 pounds if the other hives are 125 pounds or more, gets rejected. Out of the 50 hives initially selected, we end up with 25-30 by October. By February, we whittle the number of hives down to 8-10. These become the queen mothers for the year. We keep track of the queen mothers’ offspring by using color coded cell cups and writing on the front of our hives. We keep the queen mothers in the hopes of using them the following spring. Its been 6-7 years now since we’ve grafted off an old breeder queen 2 years in a row.
We start grafting around Feb. 20th. We graft 540-720 cells a day for 60 days. My workers do the grafting now, as my eyes aren’t as sharp as they used to be. Basically, we take 16-hour old larvae from a selected breeder queen and transfer it from the brood frame into a color-coded plastic cell cup. We drop 90 grafted cells into a 5-frame box filled with bees, pollen, and sugar syrup for 20 hours. After which, we drop those frames into cell finisher hives. There they remain, until they are removed 10-11 days later and placed in an incubator. The new queen cells will start to hatch around noon on day 12. Therefore, we must plant the cells before they hatch, into new hives that we divided/split the day before, or mating nucs that had the queens caged 24 hrs. prior. Timing is critical in beekeeping, and we must stay in tune with the weather and the seasons. We keep notes, yard sheets, charts, and calendars to keep track of all the moving parts. After planting the cells, we wait 14-21 days before we check the hives for queen acceptance or cage them for sale. We ship queens to CA, OR, ID, ND, MN, NM, TX, LA, WI, NY, VA, PA, and OK. We have also raised summer queens in Minnesota, when demand was high in June, July, and August, out on our farm in Corliss. I love rearing queens. Very few people can do it successfully over the long haul. It isn’t very physically demanding, but paying attention to the smallest detail is paramount. Everyone on my crew can graft, prep cell builders, cage, paint, and clip queens. I have years of photos and short videos on my cell phone. My plan is to go through them and select some to put on the website. In the future, I’d like to take higher quality videos of all the various aspects of our beekeeping operation. Maybe even make a DVD.