IN THE BEGINNING: “Keesey Bees” owned by Greg & Larry Keesey operated just south of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan from 2004 to 2007. We started the business after John Polson, a wildlife biologist and owner of Prairie Nectar Apiaries was looking for someone to help design and fabricate insulated and modified hives and nuc boxes. John had used insulated lids for his nucs for years. Blake Rooks, a mechanical Engineer and beekeeper, who specialized in heat loss properties in buildings had tried to convince John to insulate his bottom boards to reduce heat loss downwards. After recovering a stray nuc from the frozen ground in the spring of 2004, he noticed the ground under the nuc was completely thawed. He realized then that he was going to begin to retrofit his entire stock of nuc boxes with insulated bottom boards. Along with insulating both the lids and bottom boards to reduce heat loss, he wanted to come up with a lid that didn’t telescope, so the hives and nucs could be moved together to eliminate the undesirable space between them. Greg & Larry answered the call. After brainstorming for several days, we satisfied John’s needs and developed several additional innovative products to help simplify beekeeping. We began to mass produce our new ‘Polson SupRNucs’ and ‘Polson SupRHives’ and John put them into full service during 2004. We began the production of these products for the public, and soon after, began our own apiary under the name of Keesey Bees. We chose to specialize in raising and selling bees, and began using the ‘Polson SupRHives’ and ‘Polson SupRNucs’ exclusively starting with 100 colonies, which were easily ready to over-winter that fall. The winter of 2004/05 gave us time to build hundreds of SupRNucs. During the first winter, on a bright warm calm day in February, John, Blake, Larry and Greg carefully cracked open one of the ‘SupRHive lids, and immediately found a healthy number or bees covering the entire tops of the frames. They were not clustered as usual in the center of the hive, but were quite comfortable using the entire space. This was good news, and an indication that the effort had paid off. Our 3 years of beekeeping resulted in very healthy hives and low winter losses. When Keesey Bees sold their colonies in 2007, John Gruzka, the provincial Apiarist inspected the yards. After checking three of the top boxes in the first of five yards, he asked if all our yards were the same. After he heard “yes”, he quickly signed the permit, commented that he was very impressed with the hives and health or the colonies and was on his way.