FERGUS FALLS, Minn. (AP) - Every hive needs its queen, and with 2.3 million honeybee hives engaged in commercial pollination and honey production in the U.S., queen breeders like Mark Sundberg are enjoying a solid market.

And in his business, he really can crank out the quality.

"We probably only need about eight queens that we select the best traits, from and we can take the young larvae from each of those eight queens and make tens of thousands of queens," he said.

These queens have been husbanded carefully for several years to distill colonies of bees called "Minnesota Hygienics," which might prove to be the best first line of defense against Colony Collapse Disorder, the hive-killing phenomenon that has been devastating colonies around the world.

Sundberg Apiaries is a third-generation beekeeping business, situated among the rolling hills just north of Fergus Falls.

"My grandfather really started it, but my great-grandfather had started an orchard here, so he brought some bees in," Sundberg said.

The earliest record of bees on the property was in 1907. His great-grandfather was raising apples and plums and kept hives there throughout the year to move the pollen from tree to tree. He had three sons, all of whom became interested in the bees.

Sundberg's father expanded the operation into a full-time commercial apiary, or bee farm. Sundberg inherited the business from him.

Sundberg Apiaries usually keeps from 5,000 to 6,000 colonies of honeybees. Most of them make a journey by truck to California to help pollinate the state's expansive almond crops each spring. Once they're done there, they are trucked back to Sundberg's place in Minnesota, where they produce close to 500,000 pounds of honey each year.

But a small portion of his bees don't cross the Rocky Mountains at all. Instead, they are trucked south in the fall to spend the winter in Mississippi. These are his breeder stock, and beekeepers and honey producers around the country call him each year for replenishment.

"Queens have a shelf life," Sundberg said. "They're really best for about one to two years, and after that, their egg production starts to go down dramatically to hundreds or less."

Sundberg said most commercial beekeepers re-queen their outfits every year or every other year, at a minimum. The more bees one has, the more beekeepers can draw income through pollination and honey production.

"At this stage of the game, about 100 percent of my queen production happens in south Mississippi," he said. "About the middle of February, I basically move down there. That's when I start working in my queen yard and get the whole queen-raising process going.

"I'm a third-generation beekeeper," Sundberg said. "After all these years, I'm still never really bored with bees."