New River Honey Bees

Our VSH Breeder Stock comes directly from VP Queen Bees (Adam Finkelstein’s II VP Breeder Queens). Adam is one of the few breeders in the US holding an agreement with the USDA to keep the purest, most tested, and updated strain of VSH stock. We get new VSH Breeder Queens from Adam every year, when available.

Our Purdue University "Ankle-Biter" stock comes directly from Purdue University. We travel to Purdue once a year to help with drone collection and Artificial Insemination of new breeder queens for that year. We get new Breeder Queens from Purdue every year.

We initially purchased two different breeder queen lines of the Martha Carpenter Mite Mauler stock in 2018, which we are maintaining through Artificial Insemination and using the same selection methods that Bill and Martha have used for 30 years in developing this stock. As Bill gets older, new lines of this stock is getting harder to obtain, so we've began to cross these with other lines that we have that exhibit the same strong mite biting and grooming traits. Still trying to stay true to all the original traits that they have been bred for all these years.

We have imported new Buckfast Queen Bees of Canadian / Denmark lineage every year for the past several years, but now as of 2019 the US / Canadian borders have been closed to the import of honey bees. Fortunately, we have adequate lines of this stock to maintain our Buckfast bees for many years to come! We are also working to obtain direct import of Buckfast drone semen from pure breeder stock in Europe. This stock has a lot of very good traits for disease resistance, overwintering, calm nature and honey production.

Our Republic of Georgia Caucasian stock has been built with help directly from Washington State University through drone semen and queens raised from their pure stock here in the US, by way of drone semen they collected from colonies of the top Caucasian breeders in the Republic of Georgia, one of the native countries of the Caucasian Honey Bee. 

Our Slovenian Carnica stock comes from Sue Cobey and WSU's work traveling out of the country and bringing back semen from colonies of the top pure Carnica breeders in Slovenia, the native country of the Carniolan Honey Bee. We try to add new breeder stock from these lines to our operation every year, when available.

These are just a few of the breeding projects that we are currently running. We have lots of other exciting stock that we are working with that bring a very impressive set of traits to the table for use in selective breeding.

We are often asked why we run so many different lines and races of honey bees. We do this for a couple different reasons. First, for the genetic diversity and all its benefits. Secondly, for the massive toolkit of traits that it gives us to choose from and use in our selective breeding projects. Very much the same way that Brother Adam traveled all over the country to obtain the different traits that he blended to produce the Buckfast Honey Bee stock that we all love so well today...