Breeding sustainable & productive honey bees through Artificial Insemination.

Who we are …

We are an apiary based in Nashville, TN committed to breeding self-sufficient, gentle, limited-swarming, disease-free bees from available Carniolan and Caucasian stocks with little or no need for treatment and feeding through highly selective artificial insemination. All of our breeding stock come from reputable breeders and are are artificially inseminated to develop and reinforce specific traits that we seek in our breeding program.

Our Dream.

Everything starts with an idea. We plan to identify the best bees for our area that could thrive in the current environmental conditions. A strain of honey bee that is easy to work with, thrives without chemicals and produces a lot of liquid gold. We tried several strains and realized that we need to work hard to develop the perfect match we are looking for. Our breeding program at Two Rivers Honey Bees is bringing that dream and journey of the perfect bee to fruition. We do our best to assist the local bee community in any way we can.

Our Passion.

We are very passionate about the honey bees and spend a lot of energy on the conservation, breeding, and educating the public about the benefits of these little pollinators. We are committed to providing the best genetic materials available and take great care in our breeding program to achieve the stated goals. Even when the economics of bee breeding is not in our favor, we are still committed to continuing the passion to develop better traits in our bees.

We are committed to helping fellow beekeepers in any way we can. We are active in our community and ready to help where we can.

Our Legacy.

I have been working with bees for nearly 20 years. I began working with Apis Cerana Indica (Indian honey bee) when I was a child in my elementary years. After moving to the United States, I started looking at beekeeping more scientifically. This leads to the breeding program at Two Rivers Honey Bees. During the subsequent years, I learned more and more about honey bees, and their ecology and got trained in many aspects of scientific beekeeping. The learning process never stops and we are learning every season and every day.

Our Commitment.

We are dedicated to producing the highest quality honey bees possible. We are committed to using cutting-edge scientific techniques such as instrumental insemination to enhance the best traits we require in our bees. We constantly assess the quality of our bees in relation to our breeding philosophy and eliminate bad traits as soon as possible. We intend to continue on this journey until we achieve our goal of breeding a better honey bee.

Our Quality.

We believe in quality rather than quantity. We have no intention of mass producing thousands of queens every season. Instead, we produce very few number of queens who meet our strict standards. All of our breeding stock come from reputable breeders, and we take great care and pride in using these high-quality queens in our breeding program. All of our breeding stocks are artificially inseminated in order to develop and reinforce specific traits that we seek in our breeding program.

We Share.

We strive to be good citizens of the bee keeping community. We strive to provide quality queens and nucs from our breeder queens at an affordable price with the intend to spread the good genetics. As our operation matures, our goal is to provide instrumentally inseminated queens at a reasonable cost to local queen breeders and queen producers.

If you are interested in working with us, please get in touch with us.

Meet the Team

Shibu K. Raj
Founder & Bee Breeder