Native Queen Bees

The second half of August has been great for queen mating so I will have a few queens available into September.

Check here for an estimated posting date.

If you have already ordered I should be able to post on Tuesday 30th August.

We have had 3 weeks of cool wet and windy weather since 10th June which has slowed down queen mating. Very few sunny afternoons of late. I have 170 Apideas set out now.

Over 50 apideas set out with virgin queens now and hope to do another 50 this week.

Beautiful weather today so hopefully a few queens have already taken mating flights.

The first batch of grafted queens emerged in the incubator this morning.

Hopefully these will mate soon and be ready to go by the middle of June. I will be posting them out in the order they were paid for. I’ll e-mail first to arrange a suitable posting date.

If you have a swarm in your garden in the greater Belfast area please get in touch and I will remove it if possible. Please attach a picture of the swarm so that I can verify they are honeybees and check how feasible removal is likely to be.

E-mail me at: jonathangetty80 ‘at’ gmail.com

I have quite a number of orders in now and I will try and get these queens posted by the end of June, weather permitting.

If you are ordering a queen from this point onwards, it will probably be early July before it is ready for posting.

The queen order page is here

I should have queens available by the end of June, weather permitting, and am taking orders now.

I graft all the queens myself from my own Amm stock.

Native Queen bees can be contacted via its Facebook page

I usually try and overwinter a few apideas, partly for fun, but I an often able to use a queen or two in late March to replace any Drone Layers I find. They overwinter better as double or triple units and have to be well stocked with bees. This autumn has been so mild that the queens have been laying right through November.