Carniolan Queen 2025 – The Prolific & Placid Queen for Your Hive 🐝
Carniolan bees are beautiful to work with and very hard working, they produce big stores for the winter and are prolific in the spring.
Available for 2025
- 🗓️ Dispatch Window: Early May 2025 – September 2025.
- 🚚 Delivery Options: 7 days a week via Royal Mail Special Delivery® (excluding bank holidays).
- 📦 Real-Time Stock Control: Select your dispatch date above (note: this is the day we ship your order, not the delivery date).
Your Order Includes
- 🐝 A marked (Blue for 2025), open-mated, unclipped, Carniolan Queen, accompanied by 4–6 attendant bees in a slow-release candy introduction cage (Nicot, Lyson, JzBz or equivalent).
- 📄 A full-colour, double-sided instruction guide covering multiple introduction methods and scenarios. View full guidelines here.
- 📦 A ventilated “LIVE BEES” jiffy bag or larger secure box (depending on order size).
Beginner Alert! 🚨 Read This First
You CANNOT start a bee colony with just a queen! A queen accompanied by a few attendants cannot establish a colony. To build a healthy hive, you’ll need a Nuc of bees, which includes a minimum of 10,000 bees. Learn more here.
Why Choose BS Honey Bees Ltd?
We are a small, independent UK business with over a decade of expertise in breeding and selling live bees. In 2011, we revolutionised the online sale of live bees and queens, providing an easy, reliable, and convenient way to buy. With our bespoke system, you can select your desired dispatch date and enjoy peace of mind knowing you're purchasing from the UK’s No.1 Queen Bee Supplier.
By supporting BS Honey Bees Ltd, you’re supporting the UK economy and a business dedicated to high-quality service and customer satisfaction.
⭐ Don’t just take our word for it – check our Trustpilot reviews -
Our Breeding Standards
Our Carniolan Queens come from leading Hungarian breeders using pedigree lines. These premium genetics ensure queens with exceptional productivity and temperament.
Important Notes
🐝 Acceptance Is Not Guaranteed: A queen may be rejected by your colony even when our instructions are followed. This is beyond our control, and we cannot offer replacements or refunds in such cases.
❗ Cancellations: Any cancelled queen orders incur a £5 restocking/admin fee per queen. This helps us manage these living creatures responsibly and offsets admin and processing fees.
About the Carniolan Breed
The Carniolan honey bee (Apis mellifera carnica Pollman) is a subspecies of the western honey bee. The Carniolan honey bee is native to Slovenia and to some regions of the former Yugoslavia, southern Austria, and parts of Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria.
The bee is the subspecies of the Western honey bee that has naturalized and adapted to the Kočevje (Gottschee) sub-region of Carniola (now in Slovenia), the southern part of the Austrian Alps and the northern Balkans. These bees are known as Carniolans, or "Carnies" for short, in English. At present this subspecies is the second most popular among beekeepers (after the Italian bee). It is favoured among beekeepers for several reasons, not the least being its ability to defend itself successfully against insect pests while at the same time being extremely gentle in its behaviour toward beekeepers. These bees are particularly adept at adjusting worker population to nectar availability. It relies on these rapid adjustments of population levels to rapidly expand worker bee populations after nectar becomes available in the spring, and, again, to rapidly cut off brood production when nectar ceases to be available in quantity. It meets periods of high nectar with high worker populations and consequently stores large quantities of honey and pollen during those periods. They are resistant to some diseases and parasites that can debilitate hives of other subspecies.
Order your Carniolan Queen today and experience the exceptional quality that has made us the UK’s leading supplier of live bees and queens! 🐝
