A breeder queen is a queen that for a lengthy time has headed a colony that has displayed good characteristics. As the name implies, they are used for breeding high quality daughters, mainly by large commercial beekeepers who produce their own queens, or those who produce large numbers of queens for sale. For that reason breeder queens are usually only available in countries where there are many beekeepers who are producing large numbers of queens.

Breeder queens are usually pure, so are very often instrumentally inseminated. The care needed in their production and constant assessment is expensive, hence their very high cost compared to open mated queens.

Those of us who rear queens in a small way will have queens that we favour, but although we will use them to raise daughters from we can hardly call them breeder queens.

Roger Patterson.