Hello Molokai & All,

>I'm curious to find out about the Hawaii-raised queens.  Do they also
run short on supply,

We book a certain amount each week starting around the third week of March.
We are pleased with the Kona queens we get. They said Friday they were
booked into July. Because we order queens each year they will ship to us if
they can. We have no way of knowing last fall the exact number of queens we
will need.

Another large California queen producer we buy from is trying to get us some
queens but he is booked to July also.

Friday was a bad luck kind of day. We even tried for a Minnesota hygienic
/VSH breeder queen from Glenn apiaries and they said they had problems so
last of June would be the first shipping date.

My beekeeping partner was on the phone for a couple hours and finally got 25
queens coming out of Alabama. He was asking for 200 I think.

The same thing happened last year but a week earlier I think

Once we went through the queen producers list in the U.S. we contacted
Australia and we had 500 queens in a few days. All arrived alive.

I really do not know why the queen shortage at this time the last two years.
Queen producers try to produce about double the queens they book. Last year
and this year is the first time we have not been able to go down the list of
queen producers and find a producers with queens on hand very happy we
called
Usually we have got queens after four or five phone calls. Most years the
queen producers call us trying to move extra queens.

CCD?
Poor queen mating?
increased demand?

Don't know but sounds like maybe increased demand.

The only explanation I heard was from Glenn apiaires and they said they had
some problems. They said they could ship a cordovan/ VSH. We passed .
Pretty is not really what we were looking for in a breeder queen.

We are caging some of our own breeder queens to raise some queens of our own
but we really need some queens this week for some splits which were made
from a Kansas commercial beekeepers hives. If the list knows of available
queens please email me.

Bob



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