About
A small apiary doing it the long way.
Arcadia Bees is a family operation on ten forested acres in Deer Park, Washington. We sell overwintered nucs and locally bred queens to keepers within driving distance.
Why "Arcadia"
We'd never heard the name before we moved here. Then it turned up everywhere — the local elementary school still carries it — and we went looking for why.
In 1906, a development company set out to turn the logged-off land around Deer Park into an irrigated apple district: the Arcadia Orchards, promoted to investors as the world's largest irrigated apple orchard. By the 1910s it held something like 16,000 acres, nearly surrounding the town, with a high-line canal carrying water from Loon Lake. People came from across the country, Canada, and Europe to plant apples in what was called the Arcadia Valley.
It didn't last. Poor management, national recessions, killing frosts, and apple varieties that didn't sell — the company folded in 1924. But it put Deer Park on the map, and its concrete flume supports and old ditches are still out there in the woods.
An orchard that size runs on pollinators. A century later we keep bees in the same valley, and we hold them to the standard the orchards couldn't meet: whatever we sell has to have already thrived here.
What we keep
The operation runs on grafting through spring and summer. We graft young larvae from our breeder queens, raise them into queen cells in a cell-builder colony, and use each ripe cell to start a new hive — one queen cell and one frame of bees and brood from a production colony, dropped into a waxed cardboard nuc box with EPS foam on top and set on its own pine round in the trees. From there the new colony grows out on its own through the season. Done consistently, this turns a stable core of production hives into a lot of new colonies by fall.
Most of those new colonies finish strong by fall. Some we sell late in the season as this-year hives; the rest overwinter on a single deep. What comes through to spring is what we sell as overwintered nucs the following year — except for the strongest of those, which we keep back as the coming year's breeders. So the bees we breed from aren't just winter survivors; they're the top of the winter survivors.
We've tested commercial queens against our own over the years — Carniolan, Saskatraz, Italian — and they consistently die over our winters. Our line started as Carniolan too; the difference is the years of selection here since. That's not a knock on the breeders. Whatever the strain on the label, most commercial queens are raised and mated in California or the South, and a queen mated there doesn't carry what it takes to get through a January in the Inland Northwest. Local adaptation is the lever that matters most for us.
Our bees are local.
How we breed
Three things drive our selection, in order:
- Overwinter survival on a single deep. Winter does the heavy lifting on selection. If a colony comes through January with a tight cluster, dry frames, and a laying queen in March, that queen is breeder material.
- Honey production. Among the survivors, the colonies that fill supers without needing to be coaxed are the next cut.
- Temperament. A colony that's a chore to inspect doesn't get bred from, even if it produces well. Life is short.
Grafting starts in late April, once our colonies are strong enough to pack a cell builder with nurse bees, and repeats through the summer as often as we need queens. Mating happens in early-to-mid May for the first round, with new queens laying by late May; from there the schedule rolls forward week by week. Open mating to local drones means every generation is stacked on top of "stuff that survived here last year."
On the genetics: our original breeders were sold to us as Carniolan years ago. Years of open mating with local drones — plus the natural variation that already exists under that label — has meant today's daughters from the same breeding line look like a mix. Some are the classic dark Carniolan body color; some come out pure black; some come out the bright orange you'd expect from Italian stock. Same line, same selection criteria. We breed for performance, not pedigree, and the color variety is one of the more interesting things to look at when we open a hive.
How we manage mites
Oxalic acid only. Currently Varroxsan, an EPA-registered extended-release oxalic acid strip. The active ingredient stays constant — the application format changes as better registered tools come along.
What doesn't change: no Apivar, Apistan, amitraz, formic acid, or thymol — ever. Synthetic miticides work, but they accumulate in wax, contribute to mite resistance, and don't help select bees that handle mites well on their own. Oxalic acid occurs naturally in honey and doesn't build up in wax. We don't call this approach "treatment-free" — that term is reserved for keepers running zero treatments of any kind, and we treat. We use "no synthetic miticides" because that's what we mean.
Taking home one of our nucs? The nuc owner's guide walks through mite checks and treatment step by step.
Where you fit in
Most of the colonies we sell go to first- and second-year keepers within driving distance of Deer Park. We talk to every buyer at pickup, answer questions on the phone, and don't mind hearing back later in the season when something looks off.
If you're new to this, start with our nuc owner's guide. If you've kept bees before and want to talk specifics — frame counts, treatment timing, breeding lines — drop us a line.
Reserve for Spring 2027
We're out of nucs for 2026. Reservations for next spring open in late winter — join the waitlist now and we'll email before the public booking page goes live.
Join the waitlist