A mated queen from our farm costs $60, and ships anywhere in Canada by Canada Post or courier. Orders of 11 to 100 are $56 each, and over 100 are $48 each. That is the number most people came here for, so there it is. The rest of this page is about what the number buys, and why two queens at the same price can be two different bees.
What you are paying for
A queen for sale is one of three things.
A queen cell: a capped cell with a queen still inside it. You put it in your own colony, she emerges, and she mates in your yard. It costs far less than a mated queen, and it is a gamble. She may not mate. She may not come back.
A virgin queen: emerged, not yet mated. Less common in Canada, same gamble.
A mated queen: she has flown, mated with a dozen or more drones, come home, and started to lay. We catch ours after they start laying, so we see the laying pattern before she goes in the cage. We are trying not to sell dud queens. A mated queen is what almost every beekeeper means when they say they bought a queen.
Rearing a queen and breeding one
Beekeepers talk about queen rearers and queen breeders. A rearer takes any colony and makes queens from it. A breeder tracks every hive, keeps notes on each one, picks the best, and makes the next queens from those.
We breed. The colonies we like best become breeder mothers or drone mothers. The drones are half of it. How much sperm a queen holds, and how much of it stays viable, decides how long she lasts and how well she lays. So we surround our mating yards with drone yards, within about 2 km, and our queens meet drones from stock we chose.
It takes a lot of work to raise queens this way. That work is in the price.
Where she was raised
Within mated queens, the price moves with where she was raised. A large share of the queens sold in Canada each spring are flown in from Hawaii, California, Australia, New Zealand, or Chile, because they are laying weeks before anything in this country has flown.
Imported queens are excellent at making bees, and they build a big colony. But they come from places where winter is mild, so they have never had to conserve resources. To be fair to the beekeepers who buy them, Canada does not have enough queen breeders, and there is not enough local supply.
A queen raised and overwintered in the BC interior has already done the one thing an import has not. She has come through a Canadian winter with her colony intact.
Ours are from a BC stock we have bred on this farm for years, and the line goes back further than that, to Emily’s parents’ honey farm in Grand Forks. You are paying for that history as much as for the bee.
What is included
One queen, mated and laying, in a cage with attendant bees and candy. Canada Post or courier shipping, weekly, from early May to about the tenth of August. Our bees are inspected by the BC Ministry of Agriculture, and the inspection report comes with them.
We ship one queen. Many breeders will not, and set a minimum of five or ten. If you have one hive and it went queenless in June, one is what you need.
We cannot ship to the United States. Queens can come north across that border. They cannot go south.
What is not included
The introduction. A mated queen still has to be accepted by a colony that did not raise her, and that part is on you. Leave her in the cage. Let the bees eat through the candy over a few days. Do not open the hive for a week after. Most losses of bought queens happen in those first days, and almost all of them trace back to a beekeeper who could not wait.
Shipping delays are also not in our hands. Canada Post is reliable for live queens most weeks of the summer. A caged queen can last up to two weeks at the right temperature. Order for the week you need her, not the day.
Why the cheap queen is the expensive one
A queen is a small part of what a hive is worth. Say a working colony in July is worth several hundred dollars in bees and drawn comb, before you count the honey to come. The queen is the one bee that decides whether it stays that way.
A queen that fails in August (poor mating, or a strain that is not set up for our winters) costs you the brood she did not lay. That brood is the winter bees you will not have. The colony dwindles. You find out in March. A few dollars saved in June turned into a dead hive and a new nucleus colony in May.
So buy the queen you would want heading your best hive, and buy her from someone who can tell you who her mother was.
When to buy
May through early August, which is when we are shipping. Spring queens go to beekeepers splitting hives and requeening winter survivors. Midsummer queens go to hives that swarmed or lost a queen, and to beekeepers who want a young one in before winter. Late July into August is the last good window to requeen before the colony starts raising winter bees. After about August 10 we stop shipping, because a queen introduced any later has little time to prove herself before the cold.
Order early in the week you want her. Prices, the order form, and the shipping calendar are on the queen bees page.
How long she lasts once she is in the hive, and when to replace her, is on how long a queen bee lives.