Welcome

Lloyd Street Bees:
The Full Story

I am Trevor! Researcher / lab manager of the Cook Honey Bee Lab at Marquette University. I like cats and dinosaurs. When I was a kid I wanted to be an archeologist, but ended up a beekeeper. Things could be worse.

​

My current operation includes hives spread across five apiaries in southeastern Wisconsin. The focus of my business is nucleus colony production and queen breeding. The thrust of my operation is helping educate and provide sustainable beekeeping for Wisconsin.

My goal of elevating the quality of the queens produced in Wisconsin revolves through the breeding program at Lloyd Street bees. Part of this breeding process is my production of instrumentally inseminated queens here in WI. I also import instrumentally inseminated queens and crossbreed them with my local stock if they show promise. 

In 2018, I partnered with other queen breeders to form the first statewide queen breeder’s association: 

Wisconsin Honey Bee Breeders Association.

This group continues to provide a platform for Wisconsin queen producers to exchange genetics for little or no cost and improve our stock collaboratively. I also spend my time as a senior researcher at Marquette University in our new honey bee lab. I guess I couldn't get enough of the bees in my life already...

There are very few local providers of queens and nucleus colonies which places a strain on the producers we have in Wisconsin. To help facilitate independence and sustainability within the Wisconsin beekeeping community, I have lectured at various bee clubs in Wisconsin to promote expanding bee yards via local stock and reducing winter loses. I have also partnered with the UW Extension to help foster small scale queen breeding. I spent much of 2018 touring southeastern Wisconsin and northern Illinois to work with and mentor small scale beekeepers. By identifying the knowledge gaps and the shortfall of online and other resources available to the beekeepers in these clubs, I am able to improve the overwintering success and therefore the sustainability of this community.

A mouthful, eh?