OWA maintains isolated mating yards in a very remote area of the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State. Our drone colonies are selected for hygienic behavior, disease, and mite resistance. They are fed high quality pollen supplements, and are provided with additional drone combs to insure abundant populations.
We take great care in packaging and shipping our queens, making every effort to assure that they arrive in good condition, but WE DO NOT GUARANTEE SUCCESSFUL INTRODUCTION.
In 1997, when feral colonies were thought to be near extinction due to varroa mites, we began capturing wild honeybee swarms from very remote wilderness locations on the North Olympic Peninsula of Washington State.
improving nutrition by supplying quality protein and herbal food supplements.
The early years of our success against varroa, met a devastating blow in the winter of 2007/2008 when a series of environmental stressors converged with the arrival of nosema ceranae in our apiary. Withholding chemicals to pursue accelerated natural selection in conditions of extreme exposure to this new fungus, with its possible associated viruses, was a high risk choice for us to make.
But armed with the knowledge that our bees had been thriving in Northwest Washington's fungus-rich environment within the world's largest temperate rainforest, we decided to gamble on the prospect that our bees could develop a tolerance to this new microsporidian as well.
Four disheartening years of 90% losses, followed that decision.
…After decades of selective breeding for Nosema tolerance in the Danish strain, it appears these bees are tolerant to N. ceranae infections.
So when spring arrived in 2012, and only 10% of our colonies had failed, we have been newly encouraged that achieving our goal of nosema tolerance is possible.
Those long years of heavy winter losses have resulted in hardy unmedicated bees that are now maintaining healthy populations in spite of USDA Beltsville laboratory results confirming the presence of staggering n. ceranae spore loads…over 50 million spores per bee!
Since recovering from those losses we have begun to identify another significant trait in our surviving colonies: they have naturally adapted themselves to become extreme pollen hoarders. Because the importance of good nutrition cannot be overstated in the maintenance of healthy colonies, we see this adaptation as integral to the successful survivability of our stock.
By carefully selecting our breeder queens from this core group of survivors, we are confident that the regionally unique feral hybrid queen lines we are offering demonstrate genetics capable of withstanding many of the lethal pathogens that threaten honeybees everywhere.
Today's microsporidian: nosema is frequently misunderstood, even by experienced beekeepers. The confusion appears to stem from failure to recognize the difference between the 2 types of nosema, and the fact that they manifest themselves within the hive in entirely different ways.