~ About ~

RidgeTop Apiaries is located in middle Tennessee in the hills of the Cumberland Plateau. We are a small family run business that takes pride in quality. I had been raising queens for my own use, but before I began to offer queens for sale, I felt that I needed to be certain of offering a high quality queen.  My desire to do this lead me to travel to Michigan,  where I was taught the art of queen rearing by Dr. Lawrence (Larry) Conner.  While there, we discussed the importance of combining varroa resistant genetics with genes from locally adapted populations of bees in order to introduce the resistant genetic trait and still maintain productivity in any given region. After returning from the school in Michigan I began to implement this type of breeding program which has produced excellent queens. Also, because of our location in the mountains, we are away from large row crops and our bees are as pesticide free as possible.  All of our queens are allowed to lay for four weeks in 5 frame medium mating nucs in order that only those with the best qualities are offered to our customers, by us allowing our queens to lay for this amount of time, it ensures are queens have fully developed their queen pheromone and ovaries, this ensures a high quality queen with great acceptance in your colony.

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