Vetted is the past participle form of the verb vet, which means to make a careful and critical examination.  What this means at Old Sol is that we assess our queens for quality at least twice before we catch and ship them. We run full size western 4 frame mating nucs so that a thorough assessment of each queen's brood pattern can be made.  There are many benefits to using a larger nuc.  First of all, we can allow the queens to lay a lot longer than is possible in mini nucs.  This allows us to observe them longer and results in a more fully mature queen with a much stronger pheromone signature.  Potential  supersedure  usually reveals itself by the time new queen's first brood is hatching and we can make critical decisions on whether to catch or pinch the queen.  This means we wait a minimum of 21 days laying before we catch our queens.  Our customers report very high acceptance rates and very low supersedure rates.  The extra time we spend on each queen results in a better product that beekeepers can be very confident in.  This is just one of the many ways we strive for quality over quantity.

“A queen that has been through a thorough vetting, is a queen on which you should be betting!”  - John Jacob