This site collects publicly posted customer complaints about Kinnickinnic Bees (kinnibees.com) of River Falls, Wisconsin, together with the company's own public replies to them. Everything here is quoted from its original source. Nothing is paraphrased, summarized in our words, or edited.
The most common complaint
The complaint that recurs most often, across multiple seasons, is this: a customer orders bees months in advance, pays in full, and then receives neither the bees nor a refund nor a reply to phone calls and emails.
This is not only a historical pattern. In the 2026 season alone, at least five customers have publicly reported ordering and paying early in the year and receiving nothing by late June: Adam Paquet, Craig Doporcyk, Jill McDonald, james .dunse, and Jennifer Schneider. Comparable reports appear in the 2023, 2024, and 2025 seasons. See Orders Never Received.
A second recurring complaint involves live bees arriving dead or nearly dead. In those cases the company generally replies by citing its shipping-guarantee clause, which states that it does not guarantee bees once they are handed to the carrier. See Bees Arriving Dead.
The company's replies are part of the record
Kinnickinnic Bees replies publicly to most negative reviews. Those replies are reproduced here in full, because they are as informative to a prospective customer as the complaints themselves. They include describing reviewers as liars, as rude, as ignorant, and in one case as committing fraud. See How the Company Responds.
What this archive does not claim
In fairness, and so that readers can weigh the record themselves:
- Kinnickinnic Bees holds an A rating with the Better Business Bureau, with three complaints on file. The BBB rating primarily reflects a business's responsiveness to the BBB, not customer satisfaction, but it is part of the public record and is stated here.
- Some customers report good experiences, and many positive reviews exist alongside the ones collected here. This archive covers negative reviews only and does not claim to represent the full distribution of customer experience.
- At least one reviewer retracted his complaint after determining the fault was with his own telephone, and the company's reply to him was courteous.
- In several cases the company states that a refund was issued, that it had in fact replied to the customer, or that the customer ordered to a state it does not ship to. Those replies are reproduced in full so readers can judge them.
- Live bees are a fragile product and shipping losses are a genuine hazard of the industry. Several complaints here concern that hazard rather than any conduct by the seller.
Where these come from
All entries are drawn from public Google reviews of Kinnickinnic Bees and from its Better Business Bureau profile, collected in July 2026. Our Sources & Method page sets out the rules this archive follows.