Bees and Queens | Hamburg Honey

Bees, Bees, Bees and Queens

OUR NUCS

We take pride in supplying high quality nucs at a fair price. Our nucs consist of 5 frames of brood, food and bees. We will have two batches of nucs per season. Our earliest batch of nucs is usually ready around May10 and will be headed by a laying queen. The early nucs will NOT have a Tundra queen, as it is too early to breed queens in Wisconsin. We order mated queens from a reputable dealer and create nucs from our stock of bees.

Our second batch of Nucs is usually ready around June 5. These Nucs will also contain 5 frames of bees, brood, and food. They will be headed by one of our rigorous Tundra Queens.

Our Nucs are only available for pickup. If you decide to order a NUC, we will notify you when they are ready. When you arrive for the pickup day, we will be glad to go through the NUC with you in order to show you the queen, her great laying pattern. All laying mated queens are guaranteed for 72 hours.

PACKAGES

Our packages are available in 2,3 sometimes 4 lb. packages. There will be a laying queen included with each package that will need to be released. We will be happy to instruct anyone on the best methods for installing the package and releasing the queen. These will not be our bees or queens. We ship them in from the southern US in order to allow customers to start their hives at an earlier date. The packages are usually ready at the end of April.

Tundra Queens

WHAT IS A TUNDRA QUEEN?

A Tundra Queen is our genetic line of queens that we have been selectively breeding for more than 10 years. We are very proud of our queens and have tested them side by side with some of the so-called best queens in the industry, and our queens always outperform. Our selection process is fairly straight forward. We select our breeder queens from the hives that come out of winter large and robust. The second criteria is mite resistance. We take mite washes in early spring, and inspect hives for hygienic bees and clean bottom boards. After taking scores on all of these metrics, we choose our queens from the best of these hives.

This has proven effective in allowing our apiary to grow by approx. 60% per year, year over year. We have not purchased nucs or packages for many years, and our overwintering average over the last 10 years has been over 80%.