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Trevor Bawden – Lloyd St. Bees
Trevor Bawden - Lloyd St. Bees
| Bee Information | |
| Bees for sale? | |
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| If "Other" please explain | |
| These are the characteristics that we use when selecting out stock and we select them in the order below: • Has to survive at least one winter untreated • Score high on the VSH (varroa sensitive hygiene) assay • Good brood pattern • Resources used during the winter • After winter strength • Build up speed during spring • Total honey crop • Good temperament |
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| What characteristics do you use to select your breeding stock? | |
| We often get asked what makes our bees mite resistant. The answer is simple, varroa sensitive hygiene or VSH for short. VSH is not a breed, race or line of bees. It is simply a trait that all bees possess to a higher or lesser extent. By selecting for this trait over the years, we are able to increase the expression of the VSH trait in our bees. Bees that exhibit a high level of VSH target reproductive varroa mites under the capped brood cells and remove the pupae. This stops the varroa mite’s reproductive cycle. Since the foundress mite can only attempt to reproduce 2-4 times before running out of sperm, the mite eventually becomes non-productive. VSH bees only target reproductive mites and leave the non-reproductive mites alone. By doing this, the mite infestation decreases over time. To put it plainly, we only use VSH stock in our operation. On average, 75% of our colonies go into winter untreated all season and our winter survival is between 70-85%. | |
| Where is the source of your bees and what strain(s) are they? | |
| Lloyd St. Bees revolves around our production of II (instrumentally inseminated) breeder queens and crossbreeding them with our local stock towards the goal of elevating the quality of the queens produced in Wisconsin. These local II breeders are not the same as the queen you receive in a package from CA or GA. They have been specially selected for their traits (VSH, nosema resistance, winter cluster…). Our virgin queens are inseminated with drones from colonies that have scored high in the VSH assay in our yards that carry the same traits in order to insure purebred stock and can cost from $300-$1200 apiece. We work closely with the Harbo Bee co to help advise our breeding program and source additional stock on occasion. | |
| Where do the bees overwinter? | |
| Our bees live in WI 365 days a year. We don’t do pollination and we overwinter all our colonies outdoors here in WI. When we say local, we mean it. | |
| Do the bees spend the whole season in your home location? If not, where do they go and when, and for how long? | |
| Our bees live in WI 365 days a year. We don’t do pollination and we overwinter all our colonies outdoors here in WI. When we say local, we mean it. | |
| Do you monitor for varroa mites? How and how often? | |
| We perform alcohol wash assays on all our colonies twice towards the end of the summer. We record the counts of each colony and save these records along with who the queen mother is, age, weight and colony size. We use these factors to help us determine which colonies have the potential to be the drone stock or potential breeder stock. The following spring. our potential new breeders and drone producers receive the VSH assay and are scored, daughters sent out for II, drones collected for II and are evaluated for a season to identify their potential. | |
| Have your hives been inspected by an inspector? | |
| No, we are not required to be inspected yearly. | |
| Anything else? | |
| We Don't Bank Our Mated Queens- Our mated queens don't sit in a cage being held in a hive just waiting for someone to place an order like many large scale queen suppliers. The time the queen spends not laying can be detrimental to the queens longevity and career. When we prepare a shipment, only then do we remove the laying queen and cage her.
Mated Queen Evaluation - We don't pull our queens until they have laid a frame of capped brood that we can examine. We want to see the brood pattern before we sell you our queens. This means queen mating/laying can take 21 days before she is ready to be handed off to you. This goes against most large scale operations that pull a queen on day 10 and bank her before she has started to lay or just a day after. Varroa Sensitive Hygiene – VSH is the best alternative to treating your bees because the bees manage the varroa for you. Our II breeders come from top VSH specialists in the US and insure a strong VSH trait to passed down to our daughter queens. Winter Survival – Our bees have been bred to survive the long and cold WI winter while consuming less resources. We overwinter our colonies in single 5 frame nucs, single 6 frame nucs and single 10 frame deeps. This might sound impossible to some folks when they first hear it, but I can assure you it happens. We always suggest you get a virgin queen if possible. They are a little trickier to install but will pay it forward in the long run. The reason is that the virgin queen will mate with adapted stock in your local area in case you live outside our USDA zone, She will be less likely for damage to occur during shipping and will lay uninterrupted. We really like our mated queens we sell but we think these virgin queens are the bee-knees. |
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