A Word About our Drones

 OWA maintains isolated mating yards in a very remote area of the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State. Our drone colonies are selected for hygienic behavior, disease, and mite resistance. They are fed high quality pollen supplements, and are provided with additional drone combs to insure abundant populations.

All of our open-mated queens owe their exceptional hardiness to this Pioneer Stock.

While most queen producers can offer daughters from a variety of good breeder queens, it is difficult to predict with any certainty whether their progeny will reproduce their desired characteristics because most are open-mated in an uncontrolled drone environment.

A distinct advantage of our breeding program is that we are able to maintain isolated mating yards of our Wild Survivor Pioneer Stock resulting in a high confidence that we are offering queens that will consistently demonstrate the same desirable traits offered by their queen mothers, closely resembling the predictability that can only be attained by instrumentally inseminated queens.