Queen bee

Queen Honey Bees

Please note: When starting a new bee hive, you need to purchase a package of bees with a queen, not just a queen. Without the 2 or 3 pounds of bees to take care of her, the queen will not be able to survive and will die. These mated queens are for queening an existing hive or splits in the spring time.

Queens will be shipped from April through the end of September. Queens will arrive in California mini queen cages, plastic queen cages, or 3 hole queen cages. Regardless of whichever type of queen cage your queen arrives in, there will be a candy plug already in one end filled with queen candy. We recommend leaving this plug in when placing your new queen into the hive. Elton Apiaries is not responsible for anything that happens because the bee keeper makes the choice to remove the candy plug or the queen candy from the queen cage. It is always better to allow her to stay in the queen cage with the candy plug intact, to give the worker bees time to get familiar with her pheromone and get her out of the cage themselves.

All of the queen honeybees that we sell are young, naturally mated superb queens. We DO NOT clip the queens wings. Place your order online to buy your queen honey bees, and if you have any questions, please feel free to contact us - we are always happy to speak with you! Elton Apiaries is a 2020 online supplier company with listings for several different strains of queen honey bees for sale.

Queens cannot survive for long outside of honeybee hives! Your queen needs to be inside of the beehive where the worker bees can feed her and give her water and food. Please plan on putting your queen into your hive shortly after picking her up from the post office. Please do not leave queen bees sitting on the counter overnight!

Carniolan Queen Bees Shipping Information

Queen bees will be sent out through the USPS, and while shipping times vary, most arrive within 1 - 3 days. The queen shipment will be marked to be held at your post office, and they will give you a call at the number that you specify to alert you to come and pick up your queen honeybees.

Please note: You need to pick up your queen bees on the day that the post office calls you, to ensure that your queens will all be alive. Elton Apiaries is not responsible for any queens that do not survive because they are not picked up in time, or for any queens that are delivered to mailboxes at the customer's request to the post office.

Right after your queens ship out, usually mid - late afternoon, we will send a shipping confirmation to your email address that will contain your tracking number. Sometimes this email can end up in your spam folder, so please be sure to check there as well. It is every customer's responsibility to check on the shipping progress of their queens, so they can be ready when the bees arrive at the post office.

**Please note: because of the COVID 19 virus, UPS has had issues with delivering queens on time and alive, so we are not offering UPS as a shipping option until the situation gets better.**

Orders of 20 or more queens will be shipped out by UPS Next Day Air for free shipping. We can ship out orders of 20 or more queens by the free shipping method of the USPS, if you would prefer them arrive at your post office instead of ride around in the UPS delivery truck and sit outside of your house. Please let us know during the check out process by leaving us a comment about shipping by USPS instead of UPS. During any time that UPS suspends their service guarantee, Elton Apiaries is unable to replace queens if they die due to a delayed shipment.

We are able to ship queen honey bees through USPS, UPS Next Day Air or UPS 2nd Day Air to only the lower 48 United States and Alaska; we can not ship queens to Hawaii, and we do not do International shipments. All shipped queens are sent out at customer's risk. Due to regulations with most shipping companies, we are unable to insure queen honey bees.