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Dunbar Apiary

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We are a small but productive queen breeding business in mid NSW. Our mission is to provide quality queens for domestic and commercial markets.

12/10/2026

Just making and delivering queens. I had a customer clean me out last week and now I have to play catch up. Taught me a few lessons about caging queens at certain times of the day and letting them go to early. He was desperate so I gave in. Helped him out but caused issues to my own stock.

06/10/2026

This is my grandfather. He was keeping bees at the age of 13 and continued to have bees up until he passed away in his 90’s. My Brother Craig continued his legacy and took on his registration number. My brother and I now run separate operations but we still look up to our grandfather for showing us about beekeeping. Our Dad is 80 and he gets queens from me to put in his nucs that he sells each year. I have some funny videos of dad crawling along the ground after opening up the hives when we transported them to a new yard 3 years ago. I’ll post that up later.

01/10/2026

What a lovely bunch of cells into the incubator. Constant royal jelly in all cells. Finally got it worked out. A few of these cells didn’t make the cut because they were just a bit different and didn’t appear right in the light. Also posted out some mated queens. They were mated in a mini hive. Transferred into a three frame nuc once they layed and then two weeks later were caged and put into the post. This is our plan for providing good quality laying queens to beekeepers. Yes it’s a bit more work but we think the results are worth it.

26/09/2026

I got stung in the ear today. I’ve always laughed at my brother for letting it happen to him. It’s not quite as bad as a welding spatter landing on your ear drum but close. I was all done for the day and I was just going back to take notes from the lids that I wrote while I was going along. I thought. I won’t need a veil, then bang. My glasses went west as I ran for cover. It took me twenty minutes to find them in the sticks on the ground, then they were meters away from where they fell off. Two hours later I still have a cracking earache and a bit of a headache as well.

21/09/2026

Eggs and brood in the minis!!! It’s been a lot of trial and error to get these working. The first lot we didn’t put enough bees in them. The second lot we didn’t sugar water spray them and the last lot I didn’t open up soon enough and they overheated and I lost about 50% of the bees and 75% of the cells.

We actually posted the first of our queens today, more as a trial to see how our packaging works out. They were raised in a 2 frame nuc which we are moving away from as I don’t think they are large enough to get a good gauge on the queens performance. The plan is to raise the queens in the minis until they are laying then move the frames into a three frame builder. We have learnt so much in the last 12 months and that learning is starting to show in the results. Next step will be learning more about genetics, I don’t think I will go down the AI path. Theres some very good AI breeders in Australia that provide good stock.

13/09/2026

The good and the bad. We run mini mating nucs to test the queens before we check brood patterns. It doesn’t tie up resources. We can check the queen is mated then put her into a larger queenless hive. It has its down sides though. When setting up new mating nucs, the bees we put into the mini’s need to be locked up in the hive for at least 24 hours. Sometimes there are too many bees in the mini and they overheat. The best way to manage this is to put them in a temperature controlled environment and totally in the dark. At the moment it’s hard for me to achieve this so I have to accept the losses. Out of the 26 mini’s we prepared on Friday 6 overheated. We’ll have to make an assessment on 4 of the others later this week to see if the virgin queens survived.

09/09/2026

Gotta love beekeeping in the dark. I got called in to do a shift today and I had set some cells up two days ago, my alarm went off at 2pm to let me know that I had to convert the hive to a cell finisher. Problem with queen rearing is that the time dictates to you not the other way round. Lots of bees in a cell starter so they were everywhere. I drove home in my veil, glad I didn’t get pulled up for an RBT.

31/08/2026

Happily grafting away, and you see this! Bloody varroa. This hive returned zero’s in a mite wash exactly one week ago. We have 4 hives that don’t get treated and this is one of them. Oh well just have to keep an eye on the counts.

25/08/2026

The delivery man came today. Glad I bought wired frames. I normally make my own frames from scratch. I just wouldn’t be able to handle the amount I need right now.

21/06/2026

It’s a good day. Then it’s a bad day. Bees are still making honey in the cooler weather and then you get back to the car after finishing with them for the day and you find a flat.

Address

North Rothbury, NSW
2335

Website

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