Golden West Queens - Randy Oliver (through Olivarez Honeybees Inc.)

Randy Oliver started breeding honey bees in the foothills of Northern California back in 1981. Since that time, we’ve been raising our own queens, selecting for the traits that we find most valuable. We are a small commercial operation focused on pollination, honey production and nuc sales, using only natural (non-synthetic) mite treatments for over 25 years. 

Over the years we’ve tried mite-resistant stock from other queen producers, but came to the realization that we should focus upon continually improving our own gentle Italian-type line (that can be

worked in good weather with no protective gear.) We select for the most productive hives that make honey and build quickly to a large population, so that we can take strong colonies to almonds, and then produce nucs and packages afterwards.

Over the past decade we have focused our selection on “mite resistance” with the goal of producing hives that can make it through a season with few to no mite treatments. Starting by grafting hundreds of daughters from our spectacular “Queen Zero,” whose colony required no treatments and continued to thrive, we have now seen those traits passed down to the majority of our queens. During this process we do not sacrifice gentleness or productivity. We cull out any hives not showing all of the traits we are selecting for:

1. They have got to be gentle or they are out of the program!
2. They need to build up quickly with large populations for almonds.
3. They need to be above average honey producers.
4. They have to make it through the entire year without treatment, while maintaining mite counts of zero or close to it.

We’ve now applied extremely strong selective pressure for over 10 years – out of our roughly 1500 colonies at the end of each season, we breed from only the best 30 queens every spring (the minimum required to maintain genetic diversity), and re-queen all of our hives with their daughters. That means that we only breed off the very best 2% of our queens each year!

Because we are a small operation, and don’t want to take our focus away from our breeding program, we have outsourced bulk production of our queens to our dear friends at Olivarez Honey Bees. They carry 100% our genetics, grafted from breeders that we supply, and mated at isolated locations with our drones.

While we are not claiming that all of our queens will exhibit full mite resistance, feedback from buyers has been great, and even in hives that are not fully resistant, they are seeing that they can make it through the season with fewer treatments. We hope you love our queens as much as we do! We greatly value your feedback, positive or negative, as we are always evolving and striving to do better!