Topic: Honey Production/Queens and brood production
Honey Production
Queens:
If you are going to count on good honey production year after year, you
will need to find a reliable source for queens that can be depended upon to have
the following characteristics:
- Productive egg layers
- Active foraging behavior in worker bees
- Disease tolerant
- Good disposition
- Non swarming behavior
- other
| A good queen is judged by her prodigy (worker
bees). Since honey production is of prime importance, the first two
items in the above list are very important. |
Finding a good queen producer:
- Many queen producers hype their queens. "Ours are best"
etc. Avoid the hype
- If a queen breeder is "sold out"
Why? Why do beekeepers want his bees?
- Does the breeder have other interest besides
raising queens? Breeding queens is very labor intensive and a good
breeder does not have time to build equipment for sale, produce honey,
pollinate crops, etc.
- Talk to commercial beekeepers in your area
and find out who they buy queens from.
| Young productive queens pay for
themselves. |