Breeding sustainable & productive honey bees.
Objectives
Our general aim is to breed a self sufficient, gentle, limited swarming, good over-wintering, disease free bees from the available Carniolan (Apis mellifera carnica) and Causasian (Apis mellifera caucasia) stocks with little or no need for treatment and feeding. A reliable honey yield of minimum 3 medium supers with high level of varrora sensitive hygiene is a must. Even though we utilize many different breeder lines in our breeding program our ultimate goal is to develop a line which exhibits the traits (needed to achieve our objectives) in excess over multiple generations.
Strategy
Our strategy is based on the following 3 common techniques:
Eliminate negative traits from our stock
Promote positive traits that influence our breeding objectives
Solidify the traits in our stock via back crossing and testing.
Breeding Stocks
To begin our breeding program we starting with the following breeding stocks available from the top bee researchers and breeders whom we have access to. We thank all those breeders who helped us with their best genetic materials for our breeding program. Moreover we also thank all the fellow bee breeders whose countless hours of wisdom has been documented and widely available for us to use in our program.
VSH Resistant Breeder - Harbo Bee Co.
Our first VSH breeder queen we added to our program came from Dr. John and Carol Harbo of Harbo Bee Company. No one needs any introduction on the work done by Dr. John and the quality of the stock we manages. We are very pleased to have the bees from his stock to add high percentage of VSH trait to our breeding program
VSH Carniolan (Spartan) Breeder - VP Queens
We were fortunate to add to our breeding program VSH Spartan line from VP Queens. I had the pleasure to meet with Adam and Kelly at their gorgeous facility and learned a lot from their breeding program and operations. They also has the agreement with USDA to receive the VSH breeder queens from the USDA Bee Lab. We are very glad to have this line of bees into our program to increase the VSH trait to our lines.