# New member; experience with Alaska Bee Products



## sewhidbey (May 20, 2013)

Hello:
I am new to this forum, but not to beekeeping, as I've been practicing for about 10 years in the wet maritime climate of Western Washington. Just a word on my experience with Alaska Bee Products. A number of people in our community ordered from this company and I ordered 2 - 5# packages. Some of the queens were quite fuzzy i.e. very young and they may not have been in mating nucs long enough to assure that they were well mated. That certainly turned out to be true for one of my hives and supersedure cells appeared with a very small brood and then no queen. I have had to wait to obtain a new Carni queen (Italians do very poorly here) and with our short season, I am out a year and $110. 

It appears that the queen was not a good one and the owner, Mike Radford, not only would not supply a new queen, he told me it was "my problem."

I certainly will not purchase from Alaska Bee Products again.


----------



## AKNoKillApiaries (Jan 19, 2015)

I also dealt with Northwestern Bee Supply, formerly known as Alaska Bee Products but being the guy lives in Washington he changed his business name last year. I purchased 4 italians and 1 carniolan for myself and 4 packages of Italians for some friends. All 4 of my friends had problems with the queens not laying hardly any eggs, lots of supercedures and very little comb building and just lack of progress in general. Some of the the hives were totally dead within a couple months. Our of my 5 packages I had alot of problems too. I had to combine 4 hives down to 2 then those 2 I ended up killing the queens and putting a nuc with a good laying queen in each of those 2 I only had one hive that I harvested honey from so the other 4 were almost a total loss. 
BTW I have 38 hives at the moment and had 18 of survive last winter so I m not a new Beekeeper and I don
t think this was operator error


----------



## Rader Sidetrack (Nov 30, 2011)

Welcome to Beesource!


> and I ordered 2 - 5# packages. 

Do you mean that each of your (2) packages had 5 pounds of bees + a single queen? Perhaps I don't get out enough, but that seems to me to be an unusual configuration for a bee package.


----------



## AKNoKillApiaries (Jan 19, 2015)

I bought 5 actually but he sells 3lb with single or double queen 4lb with single or double queen and 5lb with single or double queen. Which I like but all the bees in the world can't succeed without a good strong queen of course.


----------



## GaryG74 (Apr 9, 2014)

Welcome to BeeSource!


----------

