Not Posting Much

Sorry for not posting much the last couple days I have been mostly out of service area. We are leaving again to and will be out of service area until next Tuesday so don't panic if I am not getting back to you right away. I have been working 15 hour days and I need a couple days break and so do my bees. There are quite a few people concerned about not having their bees yet. Well due to the wet cold spring we had it set us back quite a bit. We are not going to be able to produce all the bees we have orders for for the first time ever. Even when we have had bad winters we were able to produce all of the nucs but that was because the springs were normal instead of being cold and wet. You can rebound from a bad winter but not a bad spring. If you compare us to larger producer down south where you think you are getting their bees but you are actually getting your bees third hand you are mistaken. We do not sell bees from other producers because the main thing we have going for us is our queens are produced in the north for the north. We can not use a southern queen and have confidence that it will winter here. I have bought hives from down by London Ontario and the queens almost never come through winter up here. If I buy bees down there I would have to replace the queen early enough in the summer to make sure the bees from my queen were in there before winter. So beside the people that are in a big hurry to get their bees and need them in may(which I bring in imported queens to produce). The rest of the nucs that go out of here have our queens in them. The larva I graft to make the queens I produce come from queens that have came through 3 winters in Northern Ontario. When I have made my trips to Timmins and Sudbury they always have our queens in them, never imports. This is why I am having the problem completing orders because of the queens. The queen production was delayed because the hives didn't build up as fast as usual so they did not make drones early enough for us to graft queens because they would have had nothing to mate with. When taking orders in the winter you can not predict what the spring will be like and you don't really know how many hives will make it out of winter either. You can buy hives to make up for loss but you can't fix weather for mating queens. So first off we bought import queens and we ended up getting them from a totally different country then we thought we were going to get them from so we really don't know anything about these queens. So a lot of them were junk basically and we used our resources to try to produce nucs with them and basically lost thousands of dollars of imported queens and a lot of time. but we couldn't produce our own queens anyway so the time wasn't as much of a factor. So when we were finally able to produce queens we were half way through June before we were able to produce any number of nucs but then I am trying to make up for the lack of numbers and so I really ramsacked my bees because I am trying to produce in two weeks what I would normally produce in two months therefore not giving my bees enough time to recover from pulling a nuc out of their hive and I turn around and pull another one out. This depletes the number of bees in the hive because they don't have enough time for a hatch to happen so the population is rapidly going down so they can't produce enough brood because they don't have the bees anymore to cover it and keep it warm. So this is what has happened in our nuc season which is usually over by know because I like to get people their bees before the first of July if at all possible. This year I will making a few into july but like I say my bees need a few days to help them rebound a bit before they are totally destroyed. Please don't panic and ask me all sorts of questions on this post if you don't have your bees yet. When I get back on Tuesday I am going to start calling people and have a conversation with each of you. Like I say mother nature was not nice to us this year. It is agriculture and it depends on the weather cooperating and when it doesn't it simply doesn't work out the way you want. I am feeling very bad about this and and have been very stressed and I am hoping that this post helps people to see that the reason this happened was beyond my control and that I am only trying to get you the type of queen that has the best chance of making it through our harsh climate instead of just trying to sell as much as I can to get your money. The reason I started this business was because I love beekeeping. They are amazing creatures and I tune out the rest of the world when I am in a beehive and that is golden these days in the busy world we live in. For anyone that wants to get mad at me because I wrecked their plans I am sorry but it definitely wasn't up to me because who would cut their income in half intentionally. I want you to have good queens for the north. It's not like tim horton or some other fast food thing where you get what you want instantly they just pull it out of a drawer and hand it to you. I work all year to put these together in two months but mother nature stole part of that time from me. This year will change our business a bit We will not be making a trip to Sudbury next year. We will be making a trip to Timmins with the first nucs we produce to give to the people that gave us a deposit for this year. After 2020 we will not deliver to these locations anymore. People will have to come to our shop to pick up their bees. We are most likely going to stop bringing in imported queens as well so our bees won't be available until the first of June on a normal year. So it will be wait until the bees are ready or go down south and buy bees then go down the next year again and buy bees and so on and so on. Totally up to you. I find this instant society has really made people impatient. It's 1 am and I am just about falling asleep typing this. Good Night

~ Scott Ferrier