Where our stock comes from
Liz Huxter
Elizabeth Huxter has bred queen bees in Grand Forks, BC, since 1980, and is one of the most respected beekeepers and queen breeders in Canada. She is Emily's mother, her first teacher, and still the source of Wild Antho's breeder queens.
From rock to bees
A geologist, a botanist, and a bee farm
Liz was born in the United States and met Terry Huxter at university in Scotland, where she was on exchange. Terry is a botanist, and the post that brought them to Canada was teaching botany at a university in Alberta. Canada suited them both: an English husband, an American wife, and neutral ground between the two. Liz worked as a geologist. They kept bees on the side.
In 1980 they left both careers, bought a bee farm in Grand Forks, and started Terry's Honey Farm. Emily was born the same year. The Boundary region has been home since.
Kettle Valley Queens
Queens, nucleus colonies, and honey, the old-fashioned way
The queen side of the farm sells as Kettle Valley Queens. Liz keeps no website. Beekeepers phone, and she is more often in the bee yard than by the phone. Jeff Lee of Honey Bee Zen Apiaries has photographed her grafting cells in the cab of her truck.
The Huxters have wintered hives and nucleus colonies in the Boundary for more than 30 years. Terry was the cover beekeeper of the December 2001 Hivelights, photographed storing four-way mating nucleus colonies with wintered queens in temperature-controlled sheds. A four-way is one box split into four small colonies, each with its own queen. Wintering them means the queens are ready in spring instead of raised from scratch.
Their son Doug Huxter runs Terry's Honey Farm today, with pollination hives in the Boundary orchards and queens and starter colonies for new beekeepers.
Breeding for resistance
Bees that handle mites on their own
Liz and Terry built their beekeeping on education, innovation, and breeding, in the tradition of John Corner, Harry Laidlaw, Homer Park, and Bill Wilson. Liz mates queens in isolated yards rather than by instrument. A queen mates with anywhere from five to twenty drones, so she moves virgin queens and drones from chosen colonies to a remote site where those are the only drones flying.
Tracheal mites came first. In 1990 Terry organized the Tracheal Mite Symposium so beekeepers could set policy on the best knowledge available. In 1992 Liz partnered with Kerry Clark, then the provincial apiary specialist, to breed bees resistant to the tracheal mite. It worked.
Then varroa. From 2006 to 2008 Liz led the BC Bee Breeders' Queen Testing Program, a search for the most varroa-resistant queen stock in Canada. She also advised breeding projects in the United States.
Hygienic bees find and remove diseased or mite-infested brood before the problem spreads. It is a trait a breeder can select for, and Liz has selected for it for decades. She bred and tested stock for two research projects hunting for markers of disease resistance, Bee IPM and APHIS, with the University of British Columbia and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. In 2015 she worked with Dr. Marta Guarna and Dr. Jeff Pettis on whether sub-lethal doses of neonicotinoids weaken hygienic behaviour.
In 2026 she was a co-author, with Rob Currie, Heather Higo, Leonard Foster, Steve Pernal, Shelley Hoover, and others, on a paper in the Journal of Economic Entomology. It compared bees selected by field tests with bees selected by protein markers. In some yards and seasons the selected colonies held varroa lower with no mite treatment at all, and the study found no meaningful cost in productivity.
Service
Two past presidents and one shared award
Liz and Terry are both past presidents of the BC Honey Producers' Association. Liz has been president of the BC Bee Breeders' Association several times and is its vice president now. Both hold lifetime memberships in the provincial association.
In 2017 the Canadian Honey Council gave Liz and Terry the Fred Rathje Memorial Award, which recognizes effective leadership and significant contributions to the improvement of the beekeeping industry. The award usually goes to one person. That year it went to both.
Liz contributed her breeding experience to the Canadian Honey Bee Queen Breeders' Reference Guide (2019), alongside Vivian Butz Huryn, Heather Higo, and Janet Wilson. The guide credits her as the breeders' association president and prints her photograph of a queen-rearing apiary in Grand Forks.
Teaching
Teaching with the boxes open
In October 2015 she gave the BC Honey Producers' Association a talk called Drones, You Gotta Love 'Em. In September 2021 she hosted a field day on overwintering hives and nucleus colonies at the Huxter farm for the Kootenay and Boundary Farm Advisors. Her rules were plain. Check for disease and varroa by August 1. Check for a queen in September. Last feed on September 15. Keep the hives out of the wind and the frost, and put light insulation around them.
In March 2025 she spoke at the BC Honey Producers' spring conference in Cranbrook with Andony Melathopoulos of Oregon State University on keeping bees out of trees: how a small-scale beekeeper prevents swarms and makes splits instead. That year she was also a speaker at the Alberta Beekeepers Commission's Breeders' Day.
At home she mentors new beekeepers in the Boundary, and a talk she gave on planting for the watershed got the community interested in bee-friendly plants. Jeff Lee calls her a grand dame of BC beekeeping and "one of the finest queen breeders I have ever met."
Forage
Eight acres of buckwheat for a dry August
The Boundary runs hot and dry by late July, and the bees run out of forage. Liz led a project with three Grand Forks farms, Deane Farms, Kettle River Farms, and Morbella Farms, to plant buckwheat and sunflowers for late-season pollen and nectar.
About eight acres of buckwheat went in at staggered dates, from late May to July. The July plantings flowered from August to first frost and drew the most bees. Hives near the fields brought in a darker honey and a green pollen not usually seen. Some colonies reared drones later into the season, which opens the door to later queen rearing.
The farmers found buckwheat easy to grow, hard on weeds, and easy to till under. They decided to plant it again. The project was written up in BeeScene, winter 2019/20, and is published on BC Bee Health, the Investment Agriculture Foundation's resource site.
Liz and Wild Antho
The same line, near Armstrong
Emily worked for Liz through her teens and every summer through university, catching queens, feeding four-way mating nucleus colonies, and grafting. In 2018, before the first Wild Antho season, Emily spent a year back at the Grand Forks farm to be sure.
Wild Antho's stock began as Kettle Valley Queens stock. Emily still brings breeder queens from her mother's yards, so the line Liz began selecting in 1980 carries on near Armstrong. When Honey Bee Zen Apiaries in Creston lost most of its hives over the winter of 2024 to 2025, it rebuilt on Huxter queens from both farms.