New River Honey Bees, LLC.

Located in the mountains of West Virginia, New River Honey Bees is a small Honey Bee breeding and production company. Our goal is to breed a more mite and disease resistant Honey Bee that is extremely hardy and able to easily survive our harsh northern winters, while at the same time still being big honey producers and calm, friendly bees to work with.

We run a state of the art breeding facility, taking advantage of some of the newest, most cutting-edge science and technology available to the Honey Bee industry. Using very detailed and timely evaluations and an extensive record keeping system we can utilize Artificial Insemination to selectively breed our "breeder" queen bees for the most desirable traits that we like for our stock to exhibit. This type of selective breeding allows use to speed up natural selection, or "survival of the fittest", sometimes giving us the opportunity to jump five or six generations ahead in a single summer. 

We are one of the very few facilities in the United States that have been trained on and run our own Honey Bee drone semen Cryopreservation lab. Cryopreservation of honey bee drone semen is so new that it was only in 2012 that this technology became available. Currently we know of less than five honey bee drone semen cryopreservation labs running in the US. This technology allows us to preserve drone semen indefinitely and pull it out to breed back to our best stock at any future time that we might deem necessary. This gives us a HUGE advantage for selectively breeding for traits of a colony long since gone. 

Usually beginning in June and lasting through the end of July we offer up a limited number of Artificially Inseminated Breeder Queens for purchase to our customers. Queen orders will open up when queens become available throughout the spring and summer. Due to the high demand for our queens, we do not keep reservation lists; Queens are sold here on the website store in a first-come-first-serve basis.  For bookkeeping purposes ALL sales, even those done during the spring and summer, are conducted here through our website. We do not accept orders in any other way. Only through this website. You can get advanced notification of when we add new stock to our Web Store by subscribing below with your email address. We always send an email to our subscribers as soon as we post new stock for sale in our web store. 

When orders open up throughout each season until August 1st we will add available queens to our web store here on this website.  Orders can ONLY be placed here on our website through the store.  We do not keep lists or take orders any other way...

• Artificially Inseminated Breeder Queens start at $300 ea. and go up from there depending on the line and cross. (plus shipping).  Our Artificially Inseminated Breeder Queens do come with a 15 day laying guarantee.  If they don't start laying for you within 15 days of receiving them then they can be returned (dead or alive) for a refund or replacement.  (shipping is available on artificially inseminated breeder queens)

• 5-Frame Deep Nuc w/ Artificially Inseminated Breeder Queen installed and laying, starts at $500 ea. and go up from there depending on the line and cross.  (local pickup only)

• We do not sell package bees