This is MayDay's project, and he leads it. Layla, his niece, is in it with him, and will be at every step from grafting to insemination, which is why this page says "we".
Gentleness comes first
We have zero tolerance for any colony that is not calm. It does not matter how much honey a colony makes or how well it handles varroa: if it is not calm, its queen is replaced and she is never used as a mother. We take this straight from Randy Oliver, whose own ranking puts gentleness first, productivity second and mite control third, with "zero tolerance for 'spicy' colonies."
Randy Oliver, Selective Breeding for Mite Resistance Part 3: The Equipment Required, ABJ October 2025.
It matters here. Africanized genetics are present in bees around Santa Barbara. A colony's temper comes from its workers, and each worker gets half her genes from her queen and half from the drone her queen mated with. When a queen mates in the open here, the drone half can pull toward defensive. The queen's half is the only one we choose, so it has to pull the other way. A defensive queen mated here makes colonies that are worse again. A gentle one is the counterweight. It does not guarantee a gentle colony, and we will not pretend it does, but in open mating it is the only half of the cross we get to pick.
What calm means. Wave a hand slowly over the open frames. If no bees bump you or get agitated, the colony is calm. Anything else is not. We use this test rather than anyone's feel for it, ours included: we have worked bees that were far from calm, so our idea of calm is stricter than most, and a test is what lets everyone score a colony the same way.
How we judge it. We inspect every seven days and score temperament each time, in ColonyTrack, the beekeeping app MayDay built. One rough inspection is an event: a dearth (weeks with little in bloom), robbing, a storm coming in. So a queen is judged on three months of inspections, about twelve of them, never on one. ColonyTrack plots temperament for every hive and for each yard as a whole, so we can see whether a whole yard was edgy that month, which is the season, or one colony stood out from its neighbours, which is the colony.
From 2027, only colonies that stay calm across those three months will ever be bred from, and any queen whose colony falls short of that will be replaced the following season with a daughter of one that did. No exceptions. That is how we mean our own stock to get better, year by year.
It is also an old selection method. As Randy Oliver puts it:
"Back in the day, if you wanted to select for gentle stock, you simply requeened any 'hot' colonies with a daughter of a queen whose colony was 'gentle.' No complicated assays, and no colonies needed to die."
Randy Oliver, Selective Breeding for Mite Resistance Part 2: Concepts, ABJ September 2025.
Two yards
We keep bees in two places, and they feel like two different jobs.
The yard at the house was requeened with Italian queens and now holds a mix of Italians and Golden West. This season we have inspected it with almost no smoke. There is no plan for how to approach it and no set sequence to work the hives in. We open a box, look, and close it, and nobody nearby has to think about the bees.
The Toro yard held three colonies made from swarms we caught locally. We kept them to give our Golden West queens a body of bees to start in. Working them was a different job. We had a fixed sequence: hive 1 first, hive 3 last because it was the worst. We used heavy smoke, and we lidded each box as it came off so the bees could not pour out. It was unpleasant to work, and we would not have let anyone near it without a full suit. Nobody tested those bees, so we cannot say why they were like that, only what they were like to work.
In September we replaced all three queens with Golden West queens. The workers in those boxes are still the old queens' daughters, and they will be gone by early November. We will write down what the Toro yard feels like then.
That contrast is the reason for our first rule. We will never sell a queen whose colony feels like Toro did.
What we have today
The queens. Six of Randy Oliver's Golden West queens, bought through Olivarez Honey Bees. Two have headed colonies at the house since spring, three went into the Toro colonies in September, and the sixth goes in at the end of September. On its Golden West page, Olivarez Honey Bees puts it plainly: there is "about a 50% chance that any of their queens might produce a resistant colony." We do not know yet which of ours are in that half. Finding out is one of the jobs of 2027.
Golden West Queens, Olivarez Honey Bees.
The first selection data. Every colony is tracked in ColonyTrack: temperament at every weekly inspection, and every mite count. In 2027 we will tie those counts to the queen rather than the box, so her numbers follow her. Every count is an alcohol wash, never a sugar roll or a sticky board, the same method Randy Oliver's published selection work uses. We take the bees from brood frames, where mites concentrate, so a low count here is a genuinely low count. One queen already stands out, the one we call DCR-VSH-1 (a working label, not a result):
- In August we moved some of her nurse bees into a colony that was collapsing from mites. They started opening capped brood cells and clearing them out. The full story, with photos.
- Her own brood shows the same thing: single cells opened and emptied through otherwise solid capping.
- Her colony's mite count fell from 1.9 to 0.3 mites per 100 bees in about three weeks, with no treatment, while the colony's size stayed about the same.
What that is, and what it is not. Opening and clearing capped cells is the kind of behaviour a hygiene test measures, and we have not tested her yet. In spring we will run the UBeeO assay on her and put the score here. VSH (Varroa Sensitive Hygiene) is narrower, removing the brood where mites are breeding, and what we saw fits it but does not prove it. It is also one queen over a few weeks. It makes her the first queen we will watch closely in spring. It does not make her proven.
The instrument. An Apis Engineering Queen Station for instrumental insemination: mating a queen by hand, under a microscope, with semen from drones we have chosen, instead of whatever drones are flying. We have not inseminated a queen with it yet. Learning to is part of what 2027 is for.
What 2027 will be
2027 will be our foundation year. The open-mated queens we raise will go to people testing them and into our own colonies, not into a catalogue, and everything we do will be aimed at 2028.
In spring we will pick the queen we breed from: the strongest of ours that passes the calm test. Then we will learn the whole chain on our own bees: grafting (moving larvae a day or so old into queen cups, so the bees raise them as queens), raising queen cells, mating, and instrumental insemination.
The real work will be capacity planning. We will find out how many queen cells we can raise, how many of those queens mate, how many inseminations take, and what it all costs in colonies and time. Those are the numbers we will plan 2028 on, instead of a guess.
We will raise queens in batches. The first will be small, about fifteen, to prove the workflow. After that we will try for sixty. We plan to mate about thirty at a time in mini mating nucs, small boxes with just enough bees to keep a young queen while she mates. These are targets, not promises.
At the end of the season we will publish the real numbers here, including the ones that are not flattering.
Testing a queen with us in 2027
In 2027 we will give queens to local beekeepers to test. Open mating here, where a queen mates in flight with whatever local drones she meets, means nobody knows who her mates were, so the only way to learn what her colonies are really like is to watch them in other people's yards as well as ours.
Every test queen will come with three things:
- Her own QR code. Scan it and you will land on her page, which will record who her mother is. That is also where you will report back.
- A quick guide to the hand-wave test and to what we will ask of you.
- Videos that show the contrast: the test on a calm colony and on one that is not, filmed in our own yards, so everyone scores a colony the same way we do.
Who will be able to take one: anyone in the five towns below, at no cost, hobby beekeeper or pollination beekeeper alike. The main thing we will ask is that you report back, because the data is the whole point.
What we will ask in return: a temperament score on her page at every inspection, an alcohol wash in early summer and early autumn, how the colony built up in spring, how much honey it made, and whether it made it through to the next spring. And in the first year, we would like to inspect the colony ourselves at least once.
Where: Santa Barbara, Montecito, Goleta, Isla Vista and Carpinteria, all close enough that we can reach every colony for that first-year inspection, as long as it stays in those towns for its first year.
What you will get: a queen mated in the open here, in one of our mini mating nucs, and picked up from us once she is confirmed laying.
If the colony is not calm, we will replace the queen ourselves. We will judge it the way we judge ours, across the season, and zero tolerance will apply in your yard exactly as it does in ours.
We will not sell queens on their own in 2027. We do plan to sell a small number of nucs in spring 2027, about ten, made by splitting our own colonies. They will be held to the same calm rule, and the details will be here before then. Donations toward the work are welcome, but MayDay's Bees is not a nonprofit, so they are not tax-deductible.
Instrumentally inseminated queens, from 2027
These will stay with us in 2027. We will keep and track ten to fifteen of them ourselves while we learn the craft. Once our success rate is consistently high, inseminated queens will go to other beekeepers too, picked up in person, and that success rate will be on this page along with the rest of our numbers.
What we do not know yet
- Our capacity. How many queen cells we can raise, how many of those queens mate, and what a batch really costs in colonies and time. That is what 2027 is for.
- Our insemination success rate. It will start low and should climb as we get better at it. We will publish it either way.
- Whether ours are among the resistant ones. By Olivarez's own figure, each has about a 50% chance of producing a resistant colony. We will not know which of ours do until they have been through a full season.
- How they do in spring, and how much honey they make. We have no data on either yet. Everything we have seen is from this one season. This is where the people testing our queens will help most: every report on how a colony built up in spring and what it made is something two yards of our own could never tell us.
- How much survives open mating here. On paper the split is simple: every worker in a test colony will get half her genes from our queen's line and half from a local drone. What nobody can say yet is how much of what the Golden West line was bred for, gentleness and mite resistance, survives once half of every worker's genes are local. That is exactly what our testers will tell us.
- How to track it all properly. Following several lines across generations, and working out how inbred each queen is, needs better tools than we have found for a small operation like ours. We will most likely have to build our own. For open-mated queens we will only ever know the mother's side; insemination is what gives us both.
We do not have the data yet to back most of what this page hopes for. The data will come in time, whatever it shows, and it will be here when it does.
Watch it happen
Our entire journey, including the instrumental insemination work, will be on our YouTube channel from day one: youtube.com/@ColonyTrack.
Published 22 September 2026.