2025 Spring Artificially Inseminated Queens $250. Two queen minimum order.
Pre-order now to reserve your Lloyd Street Bees Queens and payment is due upon delivery in May 2025. We will send you an email with all the details on delivery and payment.
Continuing into 2025, we will be offering a limited release of artificially inseminated breeder queens. We do the queen/drone selection and insemination ourselves from our own stock. The two options we offer are overwintered or spring artificially inseminated queens. Both are a great supplement to your current breeding stock if you are looking for varroa resistance and overwinter survival in a northern climate. We have a two queen minimum order for all our Wisconsin VSH artificially inseminated breeder queens.
I have spent years selecting for traits specific to varroa resistance and overwintering success in a northern climate. Thanks to the knowledge I have gained working in a honey bee research lab along with collaborators at the USDA, professional beekeepers and other researchers knowledgeable in the field of honey bee artificial insemination I feel very confident in the stock I have created.
We select for:
- Varroa sensitive hygiene - Using Dr. Harbos VSH assay along with mite counts and uncapping behavior assays we select for mite resistance. We go a step further by not treating our breeder colonies for mites at any point in the season.
- Winter survival – Before we select our breeding stock, they must survive at least one Wisconsin winter outdoors. Many of our breeders have gone on to survive three winters.
- Workability – We work all our bees without gloves and occasionally without veils. If a colony cannot meet these requirements, then they are removed from the breeding pool.
- Reduced swarming – Colonies that continuously swarm are not profitable. Colonies that attempt to swarm or are difficult to manage are removed from the breeding pool.
What is a Wisconsin 2025 VSH artificially inseminated breeder queen?
These are our 2025 VSH virgin queens that have been artificially inseminated with semen from our drones that carry the VSH alleles. These queens have been produced in 2025. They will have been laying in their nucs during the 2025 spring long enough to show that they produce capped worker brood. Because they do not require the additional labor of overwintering, we can offer these queens at a lower price than our overwintered artificially inseminated breeder queens.
The breeder colonies used to create these artificially inseminated queens have been VSH assayed using the Harbo VSH assay. Harbo’s VSH assay is a test to measure the level of VSH the colony contains. This involves counting the number of reproductive and non-reproductive mites within 100 capped brood cells. We score them on this metric and advance them into the breeding program if they have high marks. These parent colonies do NOT receive any mite treatments. If they were treated, it would create a false positive in the scoring process. We have tracked their progress the previous season and winter. As a result of this process, these breeder nucs have scored high enough to be worthy of grafting from and harvesting drones from.
Shipping:
Shipped via UPS overnight to your nearest terminal and held for pick up, no exceptions. We will send you an estimated shipping cost once we review your order with you.
We will ship 2025 spring artificially inseminated breeder queens June-August if production allows. Availability will begin in early May to the middle of June.
We try our best to be flexible and work with your schedule. That being said, we will not sacrifice our quality to meet your deadline. We want to make sure that our stock is the best we can provide and sometimes that takes a little longer. Queens will require the use of a push in cage for best introduction success. Please see “Queen Introduction” for more information on the process. Experience in using a push in cage for queens is advised.
Please Contact Me and ask for advice if you are new to the introduction process. Availability will begin in May until late August.
Things can happen in transit and this is why we cannot guarantee "arrive alive." We will work with you if possible. We want you to be successful, so contact us if you have any questions or concerns