If you have placed an order for live bees with us, you should have received an email update from us. Just in case someone doesn’t see the email, we’re re-posting the information below.
Olivarez Honey Bees, our supplier of live bees for this season, just reported that abnormally cold weather is going to delay queen production this season.
At this point, California colonies are developing about 3 to 4 weeks later than usual. Due to the cold weather, colonies are not producing drones yet.
Producing a high-quality queen requires the presence of many mature drones during mating flights. Since the cold weather has delayed drone production, Olivarez needs to delay queen production, which will push package delivery dates.
As soon as the weather improves in California, Olivarez will be able to provide us with a tentative pick up schedule. At this point, they’re considering a delay of up to 3 to 4 weeks on the original delivery date.
This delay affects all of our live bees pick
Olivarez confirms that this colder weather affects all of their California and Hawaii operations. It’s also affecting all queen producers in California and the USA Southern States. Trying to produce queens earlier would only generate low-quality, poorly mated queens.
Most queen producers will delay queen production until they can make sure the drone population will be good enough for mating queens.
Cancellation offer (for limited time)
We understand that this delay on the delivery date may not work for all the beekeepers that placed an order with us.
For this reason, we would like to offer you the opportunity to cancel your order for a 100% refund. If you would like to cancel your order, please email us to livebees@beemaniacs.com before March 9, letting us know. We will cancel your order and issue the full refund.
After March 10, order cancelations will follow the original cancellation rules (packages and nucs will have the standard $50 non-refundable fee and starter hives will be non-cancelable).
This means that you have two options:
- Contact us to cancel your order before March 9, and we will issue a 100% refund.
- Keep your current order which will be delivered on a date to be determined later
If you want to keep your current order, there’s no action required from you. You don’t need to send us an email to confirm you keep your order (you only need to email us before March 9 if you want to cancel the order).
We are sorry for the inconvenience caused by this schedule change. Beekeeping depends on the weather and in this case, we’re forced to delay the delivery date until high-quality bees can be produced.
Do you have a firm date yet for Bee pick-up?
No firm date from Olivarez yet. They are good on drone population but waiting on confirmation for weather for mating virgin queens. They are very close to being able to nail down a date for us.
Thank you