Bartel Honey Farms Inc.
A Taste of the Sweet Life
Arataki Honey Packaged Bees and Queens
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Over the past quarter century, Canadian beekeepers have found the Arataki, Italian bees performed quite successfully. They are now finding that the newest line of Arataki's Carniolan bees have some improved traits that suit the Canadian climate and apicultural business quite well.
In Canada we supply mainly Arataki, Carniolan queens with the packages but the Italian line can still be ordered when requested.
Arataki’s innovative packaging system and our many years of experience ensures that the bees arrive in the best possible condition.
Arataki Honey Rotorua has been a market leader and has through innovation, successfully exported package bees and queens to Canada every year since 1985. The first shipments were in conventional wooden containers, but in 1987, Russell Berry saw the need for a better system. He developed the innovative Arataki tube package, which immediately proved to be successful. With some minor evolutionary improvements, they have been used ever since.
The Arataki Tube Package is an extremely easy package to use when hiving bees which simply adds to the advantages it offers for environmental control of the bees during transporting.
We are quite sure you will agree, the Arataki Tube Package is superior in many ways and we believe you will enjoy using them in your operation.
Arataki Honey Ltd in Rotorua, New Zealand can produce more than 30,000 queens each year, which they do mainly for sales overseas. Most of these queens are an old world carniolan - Italian hybrid leaning heavily towards the Carniolan strain. They continue to work hard at developing bees that are hygienic, tolerant to varroa mites, and are good honey producers that winter well in our Canadian climate.
The genetic material Arataki Honey use in their queen breeding program was imported into NZ by David Yanke and comes from three Queen Breeding institutes in Europe, namely Lunz, Austria; Kirchhain, Germany; and Mayen, Germany. These Institutes concentrate on varroa tolerance.
With Arataki’s 20 000 + hives working in both honey production and the pollination of pip and stone fruit, kiwifruit, blueberries and many other crops they have a good base to choose breeder queens from. These Carniolans cross queens are proving to be well suited to our Canadian beekeeping methods and our climate.
Arataki recently purchased more breeder queens from David Yanke to ensure ongoing quality controls.
For more information on Arataki Honey’s breeding program please check out:
At Bartel Honey Farms we believe being hands on is our best defense against disaster when it comes to transporting package bees. For this reason we do all of our own trucking during the bee package season with at least one trained driver on each of our trucks, often from our own beekeeping staff or family members with beekeeping experience.
All of our truck boxes are specifically designed for maximum control of fresh air movement through the packages and we use team drivers to keep the trucks and air moving. We take our live delivery guarantee seriously and have been blessed that so far we have never had a major mishap or large numbers of packages die during our leg of the trip.
Unfortunately we don't control the airlines part of it so problems do still occur but when that happens we make every effort to get another shipment of bees to replace those lost in air trans shipment. In the event that we can't get replacements we will refund the money for those bees we are unable to deliver.
Count down to the 2019 Package Bee Season
First Load Arrival
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