Tenuta il Ritiro
Tenuta il Ritiro

Tenuta il Ritiro

Vendor Biography

A nomadic organic beekeeping that develops from the north to the south of Italy with more than 3,500 hives, is the real test for our queens and the tool through which we are able to carry out the selection work.

In the normal management of hives in honey production, the first skimming takes place between large groups of sisters for each cross coming from the isolated fertilization station through a pre-selection protocol.

Only in this way can we identify the best specimens of each line in very different climatic and harvest ranges and insert them in the latest selection program at the company headquarters.

In the families in production spread over a large part of the Italian territory we keep the groups of sisters from which to choose the future male lines, we test the heritability of the characters in the progeny (F1) and we touch firsthand how the knowledge of the genetic material is of real usefulness for the optimization of production performance and the choice of the crossings that best suit a territory.

From this experience in managing large numbers of hives, several needs have arisen which we have given an answer to with the work of selection and production of queen bees: to reduce the multiplication rate of varroa during the year by inserting traits of resistance to varroa in the our lines and consequently produce for our business use exclusively 3D VSH + queen bees, reduce the tendency to swarm without losing the heterosis necessary to achieve good performance on crops, focus on the longevity of bees accompanied by good prolificacy.