About Us Glenda learned beekeeping at a very early age. Her father, Homer Park, had already been in the business many years when she was born. She started grafting queens when she was 12 years old. “It was a good way to get out of helping with the house work, and I liked working with bees, and with Dad.” Glenda is past president of California State Beekeepers Association and is currently involved as Director of American Beekeeping Federation and alternate representative for Region 1 on National Honey Board. Shannon is a cowboy at heart and enjoys spending time on his uncle’s ranch rounding up cows or deer hunting. He is quite active with the California Farm Bureau Federation and is also a past President of the California State Beekeepers Association and past President and Secretary of the California Bee Breeders Association. The Wooten’s have three children and four grandchildren. Both Glenda and Shannon enjoy the outdoors and go camping and fishing whenever time allows. Business Summery Glenda is in charge of the “office” side of the business. She books and ships queens, needing to know how many can be shipped a day. She makes and takes calls, does the scheduling, sends invoices and deals with payroll and credit checks and the like. She makes sure that the queens ready for shipment are labeled and appropriately packaged. Queens to be shipped go out in different types of shipping boxes depending on what the customer prefers. All are shipped by mail or UPS. Shannon is the overall manager of the business, selects breeder queens, grafts queens, sets up the starter and finisher colonies, deals with the pollination side of the business and, in his spare time, finds and negotiates for new beeyards. Pick the Best, Breed the Best and Make the Best The caption means: mark the best honey producing hives in the summer, from those marked hives, pick out the best in February and graft queens from them; then use your strongest per frame rated colonies in the almonds for drone mothers. Steve Park has been doing this for over 40 years and his dad did it for 20 years before that. No matter what you are doing with your hives they have to be good honey producers to be strong and healthy throughout the year. Steve and Sharon operate over 10,000 hives in 5 states— ending up with most of them in Montana for the Summer. Steve Park Apiaries continually monitors mites, both varroa and tracheal throughout the year. They have found by using packages to make up for winter losses and to increase colony numbers, they have little to no mite infestation their first year. The break in the brood cycle leaves the mites no place to grow. You should consider ordering packages this year for a fresh start. What makes Steve Park queens head and shoulders above others, besides the good honey production, is their fast buildup. So, if your population gets small, they will recover and still make strong hives that same year. Since the early 80’s, Steve Park Apiaries has been hauling hives to Montana for honey production; back to California for almond pollination; producing queens and package bees for sale; and selecting the best queens. Steve Park Apiaries uses only their best producing queens for this cycle. If you buy Park Italian queens, you can rest assured that they can handle this type of stress. Steve Park Apiaries packages ARE NOT shipped, they’re picked up in Palo Cedro only. To order, call Steve: 530-949-6923 or 530-549-3500. Stayer’s Quality Queens... In 1972 Pat Stayer began working in the bee industry for Homer and Lois Park. While Pat worked for Homer, the master of queen production, he learned about the importance of a queen, how to have early build-up for almond pollination, and a strong hive for honey production. At the time of retirement, Pat and his wife Bonnie were the natural choice to take over Homer and Lois’ business. With over 26 years of beekeeping experience they started Stayer’s Quality Queens. Bonnie had her own experience with beekeeping, when she worked for Wooten’s Golden Queens, where she caught queens and grafted cells. Stayer’s Quality Queens has become a family based business, all three children of Pat and Bonnie’s have been involved with the bee industry in different ways. Their oldest daughter, Katie worked for Homer and Lois grafting after school. Their son Matt, currently works side-by-side with his parents. Matt hopes to follow in the footsteps of his father and have his own beekeeping business. Youngest daughter Simmie entered the bee industry by having a project of operating mating nucs. This project earned her an honor of Regional Specialty Animal Production. Pat and Bonnie are committed to producing a high quality Italian Queen. While, still working with the original genetics. They select breeder queens for gentleness, early build-up, good housekeeping, and a good brood pattern. In early spring Pat selects the Drone Mother Colonies and installs combs with only drone cells in them to ensure an abundance of mature drones. With the bee industry constantly changing, Stayer’s Quality Since the early 1940's Our queen stock has been selected for honey production, strong and uniformed brood patterns, clean housekeepers (now they call it “hygienic behavior”), which Homer knew made them naturally disease resistant, gentle, uniform in size and of course, their golden-yellow color. Park Italian Queens traits have been put to the test many generations over. Because of their prolific nature they have proven their genetic quality in even these recent difficult years. This has been seen with our personal colonies maxing out unit programs which have been inspected for frames of brood and bees per colony with almond pollination contracts year after year. We are able to continually test our queens with our cumulative hives of approximately 20,000.