Available for pickup late March, shipping May / June. Can order now and we will contact you when available.
Italian queen bee for sale which is a confirmed mated and marked laying queen in 3-hole cage with queen candy and attendants. We review all Italian queen bees performance and confirm they have a good laying pattern before caging them for pickup or shipment.
From the commercial and breeding point of view the value of the Italian honeybee queen lies in a happy synthesis of a great number of good characteristics. Among these we must mention industry, gentleness, fertility, reluctance to swarm, zeal for building comb, white honey-capping’s, a willingness to enter supers, cleanliness, resistance to disease, and the tendency to collect flower honey rather than honey dew. The last-named trait is of value only in countries where the color of the honey determines the price. The Italian queen bee has shown that she is able to produce an Italian bee colony with good crops from the red clover, wildflowers in summer and fall goldenrod and aster blooms.
Italian Queen Bees Strengths
- shows strong disposition to breeding and very prolific
- cleanliness/excellent housekeeper
- uses little propolis
- excellent foragers
- superb comb builder
- covers the honey with brilliant white capping’s
- shows lower swarming tendency than other Western honey bee races
- for areas with continuous nectar flow and favorable weather throughout the summer
- Italian honey bees are the industry standard
- gentleness
- a willingness to enter supers and fill them up
- tendency to collect flower honey rather than honey dew
Italian Honeybee Queen Weaknesses
- inclined to excessive brood rearing by Italian queen bees
- susceptibility to disease
- high consumption of stores due to Italian honey bee colony population being very large
- more prone to drifting and robbing than the other principal races of Europe.
- the strong brood rearing disposition of Italian queen bees often results in large food consumption in late winter or early spring that causes spring dwindling and hence
- slow or tardy spring development if pollen sources are scarce
- brood rearing starts late and lasts long into late summer or autumn, irrespective of nectar flow
- tends to forage over shorter distances than either carnica or mellifera, and may therefore be less effective in poorer nectar flows
