Mated Queen Bees

BUY QUEEN BEES ONLINE FOR YOR HONEY BEEHIVES OR CROP POLLINATION

API Holdings LLC is considered one of the top queen bee breeders in the United States based upon expertise and experience.  We offer Italian Hygienic, Cordovan, and Carniolan quality queen bees for beekeeping or crop pollination.  We do not store our queens in “bank boxes”, and we ship the mated queen bee the same day we pull from the bee mating box.  Take advantage of our honey bee knowledge, and buy queen bees online today from API.  View our APICARE product to protect your bees from virus, bacterial, and parasite bee diseases.

Italian Hygienic Queen Bee

Italian Hygienic queens have a combination of the best traits required for bee pollination, and high honey production in their beehives.  Italian Hygienic queens are bred to have a high degree of hygienic behavior known to be effective against diseases of the brood infestations such as foulbrood and chalkbrood honey bee diseases.

Carniolan Queen Bee

Carniolan queens are a very gentle and prolific dark/black color honey bee variety.  Carniolan bees are excellent honey producers, and the queens use less propolis that other races of queen honey bees.  They fly better in slightly cooler weather, and are better in northern climates.

Cordovan Queen Bee

Cordovan queens are the most popular queen bee in North America. The queens are gentle and good honey producers. They are better is southern climates but known to survive in northern climates. Queens usually have bands on their abdomen of brown to yellow color.

QUEEN BEE ONLINE ORDERING INFORMATION

There is a minimum of 5 or More Mated Queens for each order. Please check our Queen Bee Availability Calendar for available shipping dates. We require full payment at the time of the order.  We accept PayPal, Visa/Mastercard, or check/money order for payment.  Thank you from API Holdings LLC your quality queen bee breeder.  Easy to buy queen bees online today.

WE NEVER DO “Queen Banking” Which Means Quality Queen Bees

API Holdings queen rearing process will make long living queen bees for your beehives because we do not “Bank the Queens” in boxes. We pull the mated queen bee from the bee mating box the same day we ship the Queen to you. This improves the chances you receive a quality queen bee. Most commercial queen breeders only let the queen to lay eggs for one day, and bank the queen in a box before sending her off to the beekeeper which increases the chances of a dead queen upon arrival. “Banking” the queen during this early maturation cycle does not allow her female reproductive parts to fully develop, thus developing an inferior, and short lived queen bee. With our specially designed universal Bee Mating Box the queen has ten days to become a good honey producing queen for your bee colony. Buy queen bees online from API because our process will lead to quality queen bees for your honey beehives or crop pollination requirements.

Queen Rearing Process and History

API Holdings use to depend on an outside queen breeder to supply the needed new queens for their bee apiary operation.  It was hard to find quality queen bees for the bee pollination services for our farms and ranches customers.  After time the quality of queens that were bought from outside sources were getting worse and worse each year.  In the summer of 2009, a decision was made to start our new adventure – a complete in house queen bee rearing operation.  The next step would be to purchase quality queen cells which would turn into the best queen bees for our expanding bee apiary and pollination services businesses.  We purchased an excellent queen cell stock for our beta queens.  We choose Glen Apiaries in Fallbrook, California as our source for the breeds of queen bees we wanted for the pollinating and honey production operations.  We purchased two of each kind of the breeder queens that Mr. Glen had bred himself for many years.  These queens included 2-VHS (Varroa Sensitive Hygienic), 2-Minnesota Hygienic Italian, 2-Cariniolan Italian, 2-Cardovan Italian (red-head), and 2-Russian (1-Black and 1-Yellow).  We discovered that a virgin queen after being mated must lay eggs for 10 days, and be eating royal jelly as their food source to result in a premium mated queen.

Queen Cells and Virgin Queen Bees available from February thru July.

We have tried several ways to ship queen cells, but they are fragile in this last stage of the queen bee development, and have not been a successful venture.  The UPS system is so very rough on the cells, and plus the climate change of the new location leads to little chance of success.  At this time, queen cells should only be on a pick-up only basis if you want to yield good quality queen bees. If a beekeeper was ready for a queen, another option would be sending overnight delivery virgin queen bees, but the worker drones must be ready for her arrival.  Virgin queens you can see the quality, health, and size of the live queen bee.  The percentage of living virgin queens on arrival is better than with a queen cell without the higher cost of a fully bred queen. The disadvantages of a virgin queen bee is that a queen less hive must be ready for queen when she arrives, and male drones must be ready to mate with her. She cannot be held-over for a later day; there is a three day window from hatch to beehive placement into a beehive without a queen bee. The good thing about a new virgin queen bee is that they are alive, and can be placed in a drone ready bee box right in the field, without the fear of it not hatching or dyeing before the queen hatches.  Please call us about Virgin Queens and Queen Cells because you can’t buy queen bees online for these products only.