Encounters with Royalty: Meet Your Kutik Queen

Of the thousands of bees inside a hive, only one individual has a significant impact on the rest of the colony. Your queen is the single most important bee in your colony, and the genes that she passes to her daughters determine whether the colony will flourish or flop.  Some of our best-selling and best-performing queens, and the queens in all of our spring nucleus colonies, are sourced from our friends and partners at Kutik’s Nucs and Queens. Started by Chuck Kutik, the queen breeding operation is jointly owned by Chuck and his wife, Karen, and another husband and wife team, Octavio and Sonia Vasquez. 

Are these bees from the south? Or the north? Yes.

There’s sometimes confusion about the origin of our Kutik queens because early in the season they are produced and mated in South Carolina, where queens (and the drones that need to be flying around mating with them) can be produced much sooner than in chilly New York. The Kutik family are New York beekeepers, but they have a base of operations in South Carolina where they and their New York bees can go in the winter, so they can begin queen rearing early in the spring. In addition to using New York colonies to make their queens, they also make New York drones in nearby yards to mate with them. This gives Kutik’s genetic control over their bees, and lets them sell New York queens on a South Carolina schedule. An easy way to think about it is that Kutik queens have “northern roots, but southern childhoods.” 

As the season warms up, the whole operation is trucked back to New York so the later queens are born and bred entirely in upstate New York, by the same drone population that the Kutiks started building in South Carolina. Whether your queen is a “snowbird” who spent some time in the south or a born New Yorker, the queens (and the drones that fill the nearby mating yards) are carefully controlled to make sure that new queens are carrying only the right genetics.

It starts in a New York apiary

In the many years the Kutiks have been producing queens, they’ve also been focused on producing better and better queens. This begins by only making new queens from colonies that survive well in our climate, produce lots of honey, and have other desirable traits (e.g. not being overly defensive). 

The breeding colonies that produce Kutik queens are sourced from the Kutik’s honey production hives in upstate New York. Unproductive queens, or queens that can’t cut it in a New York honey production operation, are rejected from the pool of candidates early on. But that’s not the only hurdle that these queens need to clear before they can become the mothers of the next generation of Kutik queens!

Scientific selection

Since the arrival of the varroa mite, Kutik’s have been focused on identifying mite-resistance traits and breeding them into their queens. This helps them reduce the amount of miticide they need to use in their own beekeeping operation. It also means that their queens have valuable traits that will help you (and your bees) fight varroa mites, provided your colony’s queen is a Kutik!  

The line of queens that Kutik’s cultivates are lovingly called “K9s". The name came from watching a bee in their operation grab a varroa mite and viciously attack it, just like a police dog mauling a ne’er-do-well. The queen of that worker’s colony became a cornerstone of the Kutik queen breeding operation. The name also fits, because Kutik queens are “mutts” since they’re bred for performance, mite-resistance traits, and other things that matter to real beekeepers, and not a focus on genetic purity of a particular bee lineage. 

Kutik’s have spent years working with the Bee Informed Partnership’s (BIP) Tech Teams, to test their candidate breeder colonies for mite-resistance traits. Their longest-running tests have focused on hygienic behavior, tested using liquid nitrogen in the Freeze Killed Brood test. The BIP Tech Team provided Kutik’s with a summary of their results, compared anonymously to ALL of the other beekeepers and queen breeders who participated in the testing in 2022. The results below show how successfully the Kutik’s breeding program has worked!

According to the more liberal freeze killed brood test (just counting how many cells of frozen brood have been uncapped within 24 hours) The 151 Kutick colonies tested ranked 3rd out of all of the colonies tested by BIP in 2022.

According to the more conservative freeze killed brood test (only counting how many cells of frozen brood were uncapped and removed within 24 hours) the 151 Kutik colonies ranked second out of all the colonies the BIP Tech Team tested in 2022. The data show that the Kutik bees are highly hygienic, which helps colonies deal with varroa mites, as well as other bacterial and fungal brood diseases.

Staying on the cutting edge

In 2022, the Kutiks had an opportunity to help Kaira Wagoner and her company, Optera as they were testing their new product, UBeeO. UBeeO is a commercial product based on Kaira’s scientific research on “UBO”, or “Unhealthy Brood Odor.” Colonies of bees that are highly sensitive to the odors of unhealthy brood, and remove them, can interrupt varroa reproduction. Spraying a synthetic mixture of these odors on a small patch of capped brood and then returning it to the hive for a couple of hours can quickly give queen breeders information about how hygienic their bees are. The BIP Tech Team also UBO tested the Kutik bees in 2022, and those results were used to select the breeding lines for 2022 (and onward)!  

Great queens, when you need them

By continually working to make better queens, the Kutik (and Vasquez) families have found a way to produce lots of healthy queens from northern stock, but on a southern schedule. This lets beekeepers in northern states split our colonies earlier in the year while still working with genetics that have proven themselves in our climate region. 

Thinking about raising your own queens? Browse our selection of queen rearing tools and supplies to get started.