Sweet Pines Apiary may be new to Michigan but we have been around for a long time in New York. We ran over 100 colonies on Long Island as a sideline business. There were 15 out yards for honey production and wintering but the hives were moved for pollination of apples and pumpkins. We distributed over three hundred Nucs and produced as many as 1000 Queen Cells each year. We ran a number of novice and one advanced beekeeping class each year. We regularly took live bees into schools and provided honeybee presentations to scouts, gardening clubs and other organizations.
We designed, built, installed and maintained many observation hives for nature centers, parks and schools on Long Island and New York City. We also supplied temporary observation hives for Scout summer camp nature centers. We regularly speak at schools, nature centers, beekeeping clubs, scouts and adult groups, educating both the public and beekeepers about the importance of bees, and things impacting the population of honey bees and other pollinators.
Retirement and a daughter who married a guy from Michigan has brought us to this fair state.. We have become involved in the beekeeping community of Michigan, not so much in honey production but other services for the beekeeping community, primarily in the breeding of queens and production of Northern Nucs to replace lost bees or as startup colonies for new beekeepers.
In 2018,we brought in packages of bees from northern California and from the south for our own establishment and for others in colony starting or replacement. We are evaluating a number of queen stocks and started over 100 nucs for overwintering evaluation and had over 80 survive this last winter. We have been breeding from the survivors and are entering into winter 2019-2020 with over 200 colonies with survivors being offered for sale in spring 2020. A limited number of queen cells and mated queens have been made available as excess from the nuc production in 2019. We should be in full production in 2020.
As I am retired and my wife and I plan on doing a significant amount of travel and camping, queen cells will only be offered once a month on the second Friday/Saturday after the first Wednesday of the month by reservation only, May through July ($12/ or $10/ in batches of 10 or more). Queens will be available at the same time at standard rate of $30 or as emergency pulls if I am available at a higher rate of $38. They can be marked for an additional $5.