Who ARE these bees?

And why are they worth saving alive?

  • You have probably heard that “bees are endangered”
    • It’s true. Many factors are combining to wreak havoc on many types of bees, including honey bees.
    • Whether the cause of honey bee decline is pesticides or disease or parasites or shrinking habitat, it’s true: bees are struggling.
  • Probably every “bee development” or “bee breeding” effort in the USA is focused on selecting “survivor” bees as the “bee of the future.” We applaud the approach, but in virtually every case, the bees from which the “best bees” are being selected are those with hundreds of years of genetic weaknesses hiving been bred into them.
  • American Bee Control, on the other hand, takes in all hives of honey bees. We are breeding the bees of the future, but we aren’t starting with the bees inherited from our forefathers. With your help, we collect the whole bee colony alive. We never kill the bees. We keep them and see how they behave after they are established in their own wooden beehive box.
  • What do we do with the bees? We keep them in bee yards (apiaries) throughout Southern Arizona. Our wholly-owned sister company, Wagon Wheel Ranch of Arizona carefully watches over them. They are kept safe from predators (including bears) and poisoning. Unlike many large beekeeping operations, we resist the temptation to rent the bees out to commercial agriculture. We aren’t opposed to bees performing pollination services for farmers. But we DO NEED to keep our bees free from the harmful effects of modern agricultural chemicals. Similarly, we like to avoid having our beehives return to Arizona after having been infected by sickly bees that have fled their failing hives while occupying the same orchard in another state.
  • In the case of a beehive that behave very badly, we still don’t wipe them out. We simply replace their queen. By so doing, it’s only a matter of a few weeks until all the bees in the “hot” hive are the offspring of the new queen mother.
    • We are always looking for every possible opportunity to have place an all-star queen in an additional hive so we can shorten the cycle of when we can make our “naturally healthy, hardy bees” available to beekeepers all across the country.
    • Please visit the web page of Wagon Wheel Ranch to learn more about our internationally-renowned bee breeding program.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *