Inc. With the combined colony numbers of these two companies totaling nearly 70,000 hives, we are able to extensively test and evaluate the performance of our breeder queens in many different conditions. Selection Practices Selection practices are essential to any successful breeding program. For this reason we place great emphasis on selecting and breeding our queens. Some traits that are among our highest priority are honey production, gentleness, disease resistance, pollination, and egg laying capacity. We raise nearly 700 queens each season and inseminate approximately 500 queens, which may become potential breeder queens.
Large numbers combined with intense selection pressures allow for rapid genetic improvement.
We have designed our breeding program to accommodate the three-way hybrid system for those beekeepers interested in maximum production. We then cross the lines to produce our three-way hybrid inseminated breeders that we offer to honey producers, queen producers, and individuals interested in raising their own queens. The beekeeper that purchases our inseminated hybrid queens will then open mate the daughter queens with drones in their area, which effectively creates a three-way hybrid. In a traditional breeding program, only the workers will exhibit hybrid vigor because the breeder queen is produced from a single population and mated with drones from that same population. However with the three-way hybrid system, the queen and her workers will exhibit hybrid vigor and increased performance.