February of 2019 was unseasonably cold and all 5 of John Anderson’s queens from 2018 died. This photo is of an inner cover from one of the resource hives. You can clearly see frost on the inner cover. There was some insulation between the bees and the inner cover so the moisture in the hive may not have been the main cause of death, but it was most likely one factor. While there was still honey left in the hive it was not close enough to the cluster of bees for them to use it. Midwest winter’s are hard on bees and this one is proving to be harder than…

The last week of June I (John Anderson – www.LoneOakHoney.com) was able to purchase two queens from Michael Bush for my own hives.  As soon as I had larva the right age, I grafted 36 queen cups.  This was my first time grafting and the first cell bar went pretty slow and only a few cells were completed on that first cell bar.  The starter / finisher hive ended up with 11 capped queen cells.  Each capped queen cell was put into a mating NUC with one frame of brood and bees and one frame of honey and bees.  This is enough bees and resources that the mating NUC can…

We thought the best place to start was with the genetics. We did not want to try to raise locally adapted queens by starting with queens raised in Georgia or California. We wanted some queens that were already somewhat localized. We also wanted queens that had been selected to show some resistance to varroa mites. So we searched for some options. The ones we thought were most promising were: Ankle Biter queens from Purdue University. But we weren’t able to find any queens in time.   Michael Bush queens (www.bushfarms.com) but knew we would not have a chance to get any until mid June.   Any local beekeepers who made…

Why would we want local northern raised queens and genetics in our apiaries? Those southern queens we are getting are available early in the season when we want them so what’s wrong with them? I did some searching on the internet and I did not have much luck finding studies comparing the performance of any local bees to southern raised bees. Common sense tells us that bees bred in California probably don’t have the ability to time the nectar flow in every part of the country that they are shipped to. And they don’t have as good a chance of surviving a real winter as northern bred bees do. But…