Queens and Nucs for Sale

Queens have mated and will be ready for sale starting May 1st. Please send a note or call if you are interested. Queens are $30 and nucs are $150 (if you bring me a nuc box/hive to load them into).

For the non-beekeepers, grafting involves taking a 12-24 hr old larvae, placing them in a cell cup that is upside down like a queen cup in a hive. These are placed in a special frame shown below, inserted into a hive stuffed and overflowing with nurse bees. The nurse bees feed them an obnoxious amount of royal jelly. After 10 days these cells are placed in mating nucs. The queens take mating flights for a couple of weeks after emerging around day 16-17. They return to the hive mated and ready to begin laying. Having queens available is critical to a beekeeper if they need to re-queen a hive that has an old queen, replace a queen that has been killed or damage.

Note that the two queens below came from the same mother but yet have quite different coloring.

Grafted queen cells ready to go into mating nucs

Mating nucs after adding queen cells

Mated queen

Mated queen