A little history

How we work

Experienced We’ve been doing this an awfully long time, and gained a lot of knowledge over the decades. We’re among the few people in New Zealand with the proven expertise to instrumentally inseminate queen bees, helping you to keep your bees healthy, productive and diverse.

Innovative Bees are utterly fascinating to us, and for a couple of oldies, we like to try new things. We’re constantly upskilling and updating ourselves with new ideas and better ways of keeping bees. We’ve shared this knowledge around the world, introducing effective ways of working to global beekeepers, from record-keeping to breeder selection.

Reliable We’ll have a chat before we ship your bees, to make sure we’re getting the best queens for what you need. We can deliver almost anywhere in New Zealand overnight so wherever you are, you can benefit from our decades of experience in beekeeping and breeding.

Helpful We’re happy to help you out with requeening or advice. We made all the mistakes early in our 40 years, so you don’t have to!

Our bees

We care about our bees and yours. We make sure our queens are productive, calm and hygienic, so they can go into your hive successfully.

Occasionally Italian bees can also have a black tip or light striping of the abdomen. Colour is the least important selection criteria so there will be variations in our queens.

How we select our queens

Queens are carefully selected for their:

• genetic diversity
• sealed (capped) brood pattern
• honey and brood productivity
• calm temperament
• hygienic behaviour
• queen longevity
• anti-swarm behaviour

It’s essential to have hives with large numbers of bees for maximum honey crop and pollination returns, so brood productivity is the most important characteristic of our bees.

Although there is no varroa resistant bee (yet!), we’ve strengthened the hygienic behaviour of our bees through our breeder selection process.

Aggressive bees don’t produce more honey, so we focus on breeding bees with a mild temperament, easy for even a new beekeeper to handle. We only sell productive queens. Our queens have to prove themselves before we’ll send them to you. We wait until the queen has sealed brood so we can be sure she’s settled in to laying. It’s more expensive for us, but you can be sure the mated queens you’re getting will do the job. That’s what we all want!

Bee types

We sell Italian and Kiwi Hybrid queen bees.

Italian queens We’re proud of the characteristics of our Italian queens. The hives they lead are easy to work, productive and demonstrate hygienic behaviour. The fast brood-building is particularly effective for hives for pollination or honey production. Italian bees can range in colour from golden yellow to brown, and occasionally have a black tip or light striping of the abdomen. Our queens vary in colour, as it’s the least important selection criteria.

Kiwi Hybrid queens These bees retain the good characteristics of the Italian but have some Carniolan traits such as smaller overwintering clusters and fast spring build up. Their colour is less yellow/brown and shows distinctive striping on the abdomen.

What we sell

Our bees are fairly priced and by publishing our prices we remain transparent. Our price is the same regardless of quantity whether the order is for 1 or 1000. The only difference is that the courier price will be higher per queen for smaller orders.

We take orders pre-season for overwintered queens, as well as in-season sales of: mated queens virgin queens instrumentally inseminated queens proven queens queen cells.

Where we are

Our base is in beautiful Ōtaki on the Kāpiti Coast with warm, sunny coastal plains bordered by the Tararua Ranges. It has a benign micro-climate with plentiful rainfall, making it an important horticultural region.

Who we are