Lloyd Street Bees 2025 Field Season Recap
- Trevor Bawden
- 4 days ago
- 5 min read
The field season of 2025 was the best of times and the worst of weather
Before the 2025 Season Began in Wisconsinā¦
In April we took a brief trip down to North Carolina to visit a beekeeper we have been supplying Northern VSH AI breeder queens to for a few years now. We got the opportunity to see a truckload of colonies headed with our queens return from almonds at a rate of over 90% survival. This impressed us since that winter the United States estimated overall winter losses to be around 65% across the nation. Lloyd Street Bees does not participate in almond pollenation, but we felt it was import to prove to our audience that our genetics can go to almonds, make money and come back alive in high numbers. We performed Harbo assays on the breeder queens that had overwintered there and then performed pin kill tests on 10% of the entire operation. We were pleased to see that all the AI queens had survived winter untreated and 72% scored high marks on the VSH scale.
May...Our Second Fall in Wisconsin
The field season for 2025 was wild ride. We havenāt seen a spring season that threw us so many challenges. While colony winter survival was good and the colony build up coming out of winter was nice, May turned from spring back into winter. At this point, the table was set though. The colonies were bursting with bees, drones were ready and our virgin queens had been produced. We made mating nucs up in our typical fashion,
even when the weather and temperatures were not appropriate for beekeeping. We placed our virgin queens and had to hope for the best. The result was a diminished mating return compared to usual. Virgin queens took up to three weeks to finally go on mating flights, something we had never seen. We could hardly blame them as we did not want to be out working in the field in these weather conditions either. The combination of rain, wind and cold prevented even foraging en masse. We saw some mating nucs suffer from poor foraging temps so badly that they were on the cusp of starvation and required additional frames of resources until those ran out. After this we began to rub honey into the comb to provide them with enough resources to ride it out a bit longer. We were even unable to ship queens during certain points of the month of May because the danger of damage or death during transport.
June...Hope Has arrived
Once June arrived, we finally received warmer temperatures, even if the rain was still continuing. We used this month to make up for poor mating returns and began building ourselves up for winter. We shifted our focus to making nucs for the coming winter and had to delay plans for performing artificial queen insemination. This work had to wait until we had consistently better weather and time to focus on performing quality work.
July and August
We continued nuc production in July and focused time into artificially inseminated queen production. Everything went extremely smoothly which makes for a happy bee breeder. We watched our nucs grow until our seasonal dearth in August. Unfortunately, the dearth lasted up to three weeks longer than a typical season. By the time goldenrod finally hit, the colonies had been shutdown for an extended period of time which was interesting to see. As a queen breeder, you like to see when your bees are capable of reading environmental cues. The downside is that we had to work double-time to try and get all the nucs we worked so hard on ready for winter. We did the best we could with what we had and called it an end for the season.
As a queen breeder, you like to see when your bees are capable of reading environmental cues.
The Positives of the 2025 Season
We performed mite counts via the alcohol wash in August on all the colonies in the operation. We were pleased with the results! As a recap for anyone new to Lloyd Street Bees, all the colonies in the operation go untreated all season per our protocol until we have performed our mite counts. Once the mite counts are confirmed, we make an informed management decision on which colonies we will treat. We found an average of 1.5 mites out of a 300 bee sample for the operation as a whole. We can compare this to the previous season and see a that we are on track in the breeding program. Our 2024 mite testing results were 2.25 mites per 300 bees versus 2025 having 1.5 mites per 300 bee sample. As a result of the lower counts this season, we made the management decision to only treat 17% of our colonies in the operation overall. Even with the adversities we faced in the bee yards this season, we still managed to hit our numbers for colonies going into winter and fulfil our orders. These accomplishments allow us to continue on our journey of sustainable beekeeping and providing the best genetics to everyone.
As a result of the lower counts this season, we made the management decision to only treat 17% of our colonies in the operation overall
Two times during the field season was had the privilege to participate in the National Honey Bee Survey for 2025. The state apiary inspector, Zac Nelson, conducted the data collection for the survey. We even got the opportunity to learn methods of tropi might detection from Zac in the process. When we receive our data this winter from the study, we plan to share any interesting findings with you folks when the time comes.
Future Questions to Be Answered
Just like the end of every season, we are left with questions going into winter. One of the big questions we have been pondering for many winters now is what, if any, correlation is there with alcohol mite washes and VSH breeding. We will continue to work through our data sets this winter for answers to this and a few other big questions for bee breeders. Stay tuned for some VERY BIG research announcements from Lloyd Street Bees as we get closer to spring 2026.
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