New site coming to your screen soon

[Poly Hive]

I have been reading posts here re AMM and elsewhere regarding sourcing bees.

I along with my web expert are intending launching a new contact site for bees (nucs and colonies) Queens and kit. Backed up with a forum to enable conversation between vendors and purchasers.

With some luck and Lee's time, by the end of next week we will be up and running.

Personally I was taken aback by the costs of auctioning nucs, some 20% shared between vendor (12.5 & purchaser 7.5%) per nuc. I also thought the timing was not the best to show the nucs at their best, so I am offering a betterr option.

I am thinking £10 an ad. So a saving of £2-50 on a £100 nuc, and no charge for the other X advertised, just a one off fee. Being of Scottish blood that appeals to me.

Site name is: nucsandbees.co.uk

I am also hoping it may assist the AMM fans to contact the vendors.

PH

[brothermoo]

What about fee for posting add for queen? Or other items? Good idea tho cos it seems to be in all regions that only those in-the-know actually know where to source queens and nucs of good quality from. Someone new needs a point of contact like this site to help them.

[Poly Hive]

Very interesting point "brothermoo"

. I was thinking £10 for a nuc, £20 for a colony and £5 a queen.

Thoughts welcome as nothing yet is set up.

PH

[Jon]

what is a 'web expert'

I sell Amm queens and there is massive demand. I could sell way more than I can produce. Why on earth would anyone want to get involved with an intermediary who wants a commission. In this day and age you sell direct. Three years hosting on a wordpress site costs about £100. Paypal take 20p per transaction and about 3% of every sale. I don't understand your business model as it looks like you are just looking a commission between seller and buyer.

[drumgerry]

I tend to agree Jon. Not sure I see the point PH. Selling nucs and queens is not a problem and advertising through your site wouldn't be something I personally would do.

[brothermoo]

I think a source of information for newbees to find reputable sellers is worth a bit of commission. Perhaps more of an ad site linked to a forum with so much per ad fir a timescale? The forum on your planned site might actually negate the site as people will be private messaging the traders and bypassing any commission.

[Jon]

NIHBS is working on a system of approved sellers of native stock.

[gavin]

I'm also going down the route of preparing to sell bees and queens and don't see any advantage in going through an intermediary. Also, I thought that you sold carnie crosses from imports through Murray rather than Amm?

For more general sales folk in Scotland sometimes post a small ad here for no charge and no commission, and if they are regular sellers they would take out a small ad in the Scottish Beekeeper. There is also the Beekeeping Forum where, for a small fee, folk can advertise nucs for sale. The footfall there is large, can't see you competing with that.

[gavin]

NIHBS is working on a system of approved sellers of native stock.

Brilliant! It is about time someone started a scheme of approving sellers. Folk that sign up to certain standards and can guarantee that they don't use imported stock.

[mbc]

Lol.
Jon, Gerry and Gavin have it, but good luck anyway, I think many beekeepers would find the services of a "web expert" helpful for 21st century bee sales.

[brothermoo]

NIHBS is working on a system of approved sellers of native stock.
Excellent stuff... I think thats important as it shows ordinary beekeepers, who aren't too concerned with the ins and outs, that nihbs are working to make native stick accessible. I'm lucky to know you Jon, but others who have only facebook or forums to discuss pros and cons of amm will at least have the info to source the stocks they want

[fatshark]

Brilliant! It is about time someone started a scheme of approving sellers. Folk that sign up to certain standards and can guarantee that they don't use imported stock.

I'm guessing the approval isn't going to be based on wing morphometry ;)

This is an interesting development … do the NIHBS plan to make this available outside NI?

[Jon]

3/4 of NIHBS is in the Republic.
There are quite a lot of issues to resolve.
NIHBS does not want people popping up all over the place selling native queens which in reality just happen to be dark bees.
I have noticed some of the English mail order queen suppliers have already jumped on this bandwagon.
We had a list of suppliers on the website last summer but some people were worried about whether certain folk should be on it or not.
Another issue is around the purity of stock and legal issues if bees are advertised as Amm.
I think we are most likely looking to adopt some sort of code of conduct where sellers sign up to principles of best practice and agree to have their stock checked from time to time.
NIHBS is involved in projects in Galway and Limerick both of which involve DNA testing of samples so that should allow some sort of monitoring of the stock selected for breeding.
With open mating you cannot give 100% guarantees even if the queen you are grafting from is Amm stock.
A lot of people are very keen on the NIHBS honey stickers - produce of native Irish honey bees -and those using the label should definitely be signing up to a certain vision.

2201

The thing about wing morphometry is that if you start with pure stock and test daughter colonies it will pick up hybridisation so it is useful for that.
The problem is that the Galtee people and other breeders have been using it for years so that pretty much invalidates it as a useful tool based on the selection artifact described by Robin Moritz in his Limitations of Biometric Morphometry paper.
Using wing morphometry on stock which has been hybridised for generations is absolutely pointless.

[gavin]

I think a source of information for newbees to find reputable sellers is worth a bit of commission.

Leaving aside the Amm aspect for a while, this business of helping people find *reputable* suppliers is something that really needs attention, especially in a time of concern over a new pest getting here from continental and Mediterranean Europe. I see no sign that Poly Hive is the man to do this though. I'm thinking of the average new entrant into beekeeping, someone who doesn't even know about Amm and has very little guidance readily available on how to source your bees ethically.

If you were to exclude from this list every established commercial nuc or queen seller who ever bought an imported queen or package from mainland/Mediterranean Europe and who *can't* demonstrate with official paperwork that the importation was legal, you'd be down to a very small number of suppliers. Even just holding suppliers (somehow) to no false claims of having 'British' or 'Scottish' bees would thin them out significantly.

[Poly Hive]

Well well thanks for the vote of confidence Gavin.

As for why? Well there are bee auctions so there is a demand for a sales venue. Not everyone can attend these auctions nor is the timing of them particularly helpful. When you look at the costs of using that system it is not cheap nor is it cheap using line ads in say Beecraft. As far as I know there is actually nothing at all in Scotland for example.

I have read in the forums more than a few times the complaint that "I canot source xyz" so I thought to be of help.

As for obtaining bees ethically, the usual source is from with in an association is it not, and where those bees come from is frankly anyones guess.

PH

Where my bees come from is common knowledge and I frankly do not see their relevance to a web site. My "web guru" is a very competent web site builder who has created both my business site and the PH one.

[gavin]

As for obtaining bees ethically, the usual source is from with in an association is it not, and where those bees come from is frankly anyones guess.


Many associations here do it reasonably well. However many (most?) folk these days getting into beekeeping turn to other sources either because their local association isn't that proactive and visible or it isn't that good at generating enough nucs to meet the need.

These other sources - the commercial ones - seem to me to be largely unregulated and often follow practices that could do with some improvement to put it mildly. I was motivated to ask the SBA to set up this forum because of experiences with one of them, sending (selling) unsuitable stocks with imported carnie queens from deepest England to a sensitive place in Wester Ross with free-living Amm ferals and where Varroa hadn't yet reached at the time. Others are selling bees and using imported stocks to support their businesses in various ways and not all is up front. Many bring in bees under the radar, and it is these sales that bring the greatest risk of new pests into the UK - cheap deals involving imported bees and don't ask too many questions.

So I was partly reacting to Brothermoo's suggestion of pointing people to reputable suppliers. How you do that is exceedingly difficult and perhaps the best way to make steps in that direction is agreeing national standards for certification of some kind. Full disclosure to customers and also to the authorities on every shipment of bees, together with paperwork. Inspections that confirm the vendor has the capacity to generate the bees required for the sales made. Policies on when and where to source source bees. Policies on where not to sell bees for reasons of Varroa or local concentrations of one particular type of bee.

At this moment in time the SBA is committed to asking people to not import and to avoid imported bees. Once the spread of SHB is better known there will be pressure to relax this policy. In the meantime getting the bee trade industry more ethical, honest, transparent and legal requires would be something well worth doing. That could only come about through a national scheme with standards, publicity and teeth involving the main organisations. Not sure many of them are up for that.

It seemed that your proposed site was going to focus on Amm. Maybe I'm wrong there. Try it out by all means, but as Jon has said finding customers for the level of production around is usually not a problem. I don't see that a payment based site is going to be attractive for that sort of vendor.

[Jon]

My website costs about £3 per month to host. I have a paypal button on it which was free to set up and only takes a few minutes of cut and paste from the paypal website.
Anyone looking to buy a queen can google using common search terms for purchasing a queen bee or they can google my name and they will find it easy enough.
When someone buys a queen the button sends an autogenerated message to my e-mail with the purchaser details and address.
Paypal take about £1.30 from a sale of £35 and the balance sits in my paypal account.
I really can't see the need for websites pointing at websites and taking a commission for doing so.
The other useful format for finding customers is Facebook and that is completely free.
You set up a Facebook site, update it periodically and provide links from it to the paypal button on your website.
It really is that simple and does not require a web expert or anything like it.
Things have moved on in the wordpress website era and you really do not need any HTML skills to set up and manage a website.
It is all based on templates.
Your Poly-hive website is a bog standard wordpress template site.
wordpress sites can be expanded to whatever size you want and can store a huge library of photos and video.
If you are paying much more than £3 a month for hosting you are overpaying.

[Jon]

As for obtaining bees ethically, the usual source is from with in an association is it not, and where those bees come from is frankly anyones guess.

It's not like that in our association. Our association runs a summer programme which includes a queen rearing group and the members use queens for making up nucs or requeening colonies. Beginners get nucs via the association and these are headed by queens grafted from Amm stock. There are several other local associations with similar programmes. We have 5 queen rearing groups in NI all working with native stock. Beekeeping works far better when people cooperate and work together. Beginners need to start with locally sourced native bees which will not become a nightmare a couple of generations down the line when they hybridise.

[drumgerry]

I can't imagine paying anyone to create a website for me to be honest. From a position of very little knowledge I created the Moray Beekeepers Assoc website on Wordpress and it remains pretty much as I created it despite me having left them some time ago. The best marketing tool bar none if you ask me is Facebook. That interaction with customers is priceless. And it's free. So I'm afraid I really don't see the point of your proposed site PH.

As for an assured quality/accredited seller scheme - great idea but again it won't happen till hell freezes over with the current beekeeping powers that be.

[Jon]

As for an assured quality/accredited seller scheme - great idea but again it won't happen till hell freezes over with the current beekeeping powers that be.

You need to get that Native Scottish Honeybee Society up and running and that body could oversee a list of approved sellers. A commitment to avoid any imports of bees and queens would be an obvious starting point.

[gavin]

As for an assured quality/accredited seller scheme - great idea but again it won't happen till hell freezes over with the current beekeeping powers that be.

I have a kettle full of lukewarm water sitting in my kitchen. Could even switch it on again. Would that help?! :)

[gavin]

You need to get that Native Scottish Honeybee Society up and running and that body could oversee a list of approved sellers. A commitment to avoid any imports of bees and queens would be an obvious starting point.

Yes for Scottish Amm suppliers, but the bulk of the trade on the UK mainland is likely to remain of other types. Two ways forward: copy NIHBS (SNOBS!) and promote an ethical product, and persuade other parts of the bee trade business to clean up their act(s) and follow safer and better ways of working.

[drumgerry]

Jon you may have noticed my use of "current"!!

I'm thinking it might take a wee bit more than your kettle Gavin! ;)

[Adam]

There's been several websites for auctioning or selling bees in the past and they all seem to have faded away. I guess there must be some reason for this?

[Jon]

There are a few on facebook as well

[Black Comb]

I think all selling sites are where some effort has to be made to sell.
Re. Nucs, it is nearly always the case that if you can produce them, you will sell them.
In my short time keeping bees, demand has always outstripped supply.

[Poly Hive]

What I pay to whom is my business, literally. :) Indeed my site is WP, and it works, well. Just one example, BM on Damp and Condensation was read in it's totality in Japan yesterday. I find that awesome.

Gavin I mentioned AMM as a case in point. Purchasers looking for vendors and unable to find them.

Anyway al,l the site will be up in the next few days and the market will say whether it is worth running or not.

If you want a good site created for your business I know the guy to help you at a very realistic price.

PH

[Jon]

Just one example, BM on Damp and Condensation was read in it's totality in Japan yesterday. I find that awesome.

You can't possibly know that. The site stats show you when someone clicks on a link. Maybe they spent an hour on the page or maybe 1 second.



Gavin I mentioned AMM as a case in point. Purchasers looking for vendors and unable to find them.

Are you claiming that potential purchasers are unaware of Google?

[busybeephilip]

The thing about queen rearing is that its simple for anyone to do it and the clubs are heavily promoting just that. Its easy for anyone to buy queens from a reputable source eg Black or buckfast, straight out of an apidea then breed 2-300 queens for selling and sell then off as F1 generation bees for £30-40 each or approx £10,000 per season. (a very nice tax free income for a club to purchase more beekeeking gear).

There is no regulation over this activity, any Tom Dick or Harry can do it and so undermine any effort made by SNOBS or Native Scottish Bee Society esp if they are all using the same starting materials

We all know the problem comes when open mating is used, there is no guarantee that a queen mated in an area even if it is flooded with drones or local vicinity apairy mating that you have an unknown neighbour within walking distance who keeps a hive of "bad" bees in their back garden and may even be using these for his own breeding program rearing lots of "bad" drones.

So of the 300 queens raised, mated in apideas then posted to beekeepers a percentage may not have the desired characteristics of the parents, after all, it takes at least a year to identify a good queen re temper, honey etc. Undesired characteristics can ruin the reputation of a breeding operation overnight, it just takes one person on the internet to say they got a queen producing cross bees, swarmy bees, no spring buildup or no honey.


So the point is, this all reverts back to the location of an apairy mating site, this should be an island or some other isolated piece of moor waste land, plenty of this in Scotland and of course you need someone to put in the time 7 days a week in the summer. Of course, once you have given free of charge queens to your neighbours then you have produced the ideal mating site until someone you dont know decides to keep bees and wrecks it by keeping "bad" bees.

And here in NI anyone can sell bees and often do due to demand and overpricing, £50 is plenty for a 5 frame nuc regardless of the source of bees

[busybeephilip]

Just looking at websites - if you google black queen bees there are loads of places in the UK that have jumped on the bandwagon all with very convincing professionally designed websites. Also lots selling buckfast and carnies as well - appears to be no shortage but a tad expensive !

[Calum]

Hi
its in German, but here is a site design that works well and could be implemented on this website (http://www.imkermarkt.de/typ/2/kategorie/3?page=1)"as is" (though I would make changes - more below)- they get a lot of traffic, and are a go to site for beekeepers all over Germany.
I think an "exchange and mart" site is brillaint -but it will not gain traction if you charge people tho - they will just use ebay local (if you get that in the UK).
Advertising on the site is the way to go to cover costs.
So to the SBA exchange and mart- this should be the first goto place for Scottish beekeepers!

I would add the following sub folders:
-Selling queens / colonies
- Selling Equipment
- Selling Honey
- Buying queens / colonies
- Buying equipment
- Buying honey
That would make things easier to find..
I can supply the details of the format for the data capture (http://www.imkermarkt.de/kleinanzeigen/new)if anyone is interested

[Bumble]

Leaving aside the Amm aspect for a while, this business of helping people find *reputable* suppliers is something that really needs attention...
A new beekeeper is a trusting thing, who parts with a lot of money, often to commercial breeders who make grand claims but who have equally grand disclaimers such as, "You can have a choice of race at the time of ordering however [...] you may not get the race you have chosen." How is a new beekeeper to know they've been sold a pup until it's too late to do anything about it? There may be a voluntary code of practice for selling nucs, but there is nobody to enforce it.


I really can't see the need for websites pointing at websites and taking a commission for doing so.
Especially as google already does it for free.

A site carrying paid adverts is no better, and no more trustworthy, than the ads pages in a local paper.

[prakel]

£50 is plenty for a 5 frame nuc regardless of the source of bees

What's a fair price for a home reared queen in Northern Ireland?

[Poly Hive]

Supply and demand control prices. Always have and apart from the Communist countries still does and will. £150 seems the normal price for a five frame nuc from the "big boys" like it or lump it.

PH

[gavin]

£50 is a silly price for a nuc. Some people still give them away.

A market price isn't just driven by supply and demand, it also depends on things like the costs of production. When operating commercially no-one is going to sell nucs at below the costs, for long anyway. If you are running a beekeeping enterprise that mixes honey production with nuc production, then the costs of producing nucs would be:

- materials (eg nuc boxes for the duration of their use for the enterprise, frames, foundation, feed)
- costs of maintaining and requeening mother stocks
- loss of production if the bee power had been put to a productive use

Five frames, wood and wax, could cost a tenner or less if you buy in bulk.

Making, say, 4 nucs from one of your better colonies of which three end up with mated queens and build would cost you the summer's honey production. In a well maintained apiary on a good site (from your better colonies) that could be a super to a super and a half ie ~£300-400. Add in time, depreciation of equipment, fuel to get to your apiaries and a cost of £125-£150 per nuc isn't looking so profitable after all.

You could argue about all of these assumptions but £50 a nuc just isn't sustainable. Of course you *could* buy in packages (£80 including shipping costs?) and sell them on at £120-£150, or build them to 5-frame nucs, and you'd be raking it in as well as externalising those risks every beekeeper now faces from imported pathogens.

[Jon]

I had a chat with Dan Basterfield at the UBKA conference last year and he said that he would never sell a nuc unless he had nowhere to put it as any decent nuc should be able to grow and produce 2-3 supers of honey in Devon and that is worth far more than the price of a nuc.

[fatshark]

Correct Gavin ... but you also need to factor in time of season. The "potential" in an overwintered nuc is enormous - a good season generates all you describe and the possibility of a well-timed nuc split off as well. The gift that keeps on giving. For a locally-raised queen with good genes heading a strong, healthy, overwintered 5 frame nuc £150 is certainly not unreasonable. You're paying for everything you describe plus the sub-standard queens that get culled, the inevitable losses and the experience necessary to generate a quality product.

And if you're selling locally (which is how you should be buying) you're probably also going to be giving some 'free' advice either at point of sale or subsequently.

[prakel]

I had a chat with Dan Basterfield at the UBKA conference last year and he said that he would never sell a nuc unless he had nowhere to put it as any decent nuc should be able to grow and produce 2-3 supers of honey in Devon and that is worth far more than the price of a nuc.

Just what I've been saying about selling overwintered queens early in the season; you'd need an awful lot of them to justify letting some go.

[Jon]

Some of my overwintered queens will be used to replace drone layers and the rest will be used to make up nucs.
I have no intention of selling any.
Any overwintered nuc or an overwintered queen is worth quite a bit.
A small nuc in August is not really an attractive prospect as it probably wont get through the winter.

[Pete L]

A small nuc in August is not really an attractive prospect as it probably wont get through the winter.

I make up the majority of my nucs for over wintering from mid August, until the end of September, but they are made up strong, and over winter well. But i would not sell anyone a nuc at this time of year.
It uses up surplus young queens and bees from mini nucs, ones that i don't intend to over winter in the mini nucs, plus extra resources used from the stronger full size colonies, like frames of brood.

[mbc]

Just what I've been saying about selling overwintered queens early in the season; you'd need an awful lot of them to justify letting some go.

This is key.
To have any chance of competing with mass importation of cheap bees and queens, we need to think big.

I always try and produce far more than my needs and yet they're gone as soon as I decide they're surplus, and I could sell many more even at the upper end of market price. Putting a value on queens is as Gavin describes, though you need to factor in the cost of processing and marketing the honey. It is almost impossible to produce queens cheaper than it is possible to buy them, the sad truth is that it is so much easier to make a profit at beekeeping by looking south for your queens, not that I'm advocating it, I think this path is easier in the short term but doesn't lend itself to a successful self supporting future.

[Jon]

That's it in a nutshell and that is why uk commercial beekeepers and nuc distributors just buy in cheap queens from non native subspecies from Europe. Sure they could raise their own but if it is all about the bottom line I guess the cheaper option is attractive - yet they share the risk of introducing SHB with all then rest of us. I think they can get queens for £10 or less buying in bulk. Obviously they pass them on to the punters at about £40 per queen with a sales pitch.

I think it is critical that those of us who are anti import start to provide an alternative and that involves overwintering queens.

[mbc]

That's it in a nutshell and that is why uk commercial beekeepers and nuc distributors just buy in cheap queens from non native subspecies from Europe. Sure they could raise their own but if it is all about the bottom line I guess the cheaper option is attractive - yet they share the risk of introducing SHB with all then rest of us. I think they can get queens for £10 or less buying in bulk. Obviously they pass them on to the punters at about £40 per queen with a sales pitch.

I think it is critical that those of us who are anti import start to provide an alternative and that involves overwintering queens.

Whenever I sketch out the maths, the value to me of each queen is somewhere upwards of this £40 mark, dependant on unknown variables of what the forthcoming seasons have in store of course.

[prakel]

Personally i think that IF the long game is to stop imports then the best way forward is to try and focus people's minds on late summer/autumn requeening. Move away from using spring queens unless they're our own overwintered stock. That would be so much more sustainable, and could be done at a sensible price.

[madasafish]

Personally i think that IF the long game is to stop imports then the best way forward is to try and focus people's minds on late summer/autumn requeening. Move away from using spring queens unless they're our own overwintered stock. That would be so much more sustainable, and could be done at a sensible price.

Trouble is: beginners and those with little experience lose colonies over winter so need bees/nucs/queens in spring.. Add a harsh winter and experienced beekeepers need them in spring as well...

The anti import campaign needs to fight our climate...Importing has been going on for 150 years and no-one - let alone the national associations - has done anything PRACTICAL to counter it.

You need organisation, money and marketing to make a difference.. I see no evidence of any of that...Crowd funding could help - like the Flow Hive:-)

[busybeephilip]

So we are back to rearing queens in the autumn and overwintering them for sale in the spring. Jon seems to be able to do this with little difficulty so perhaps this is the way forward

[Jon]

This year has been good but I lose most or all of the queens in apideas during a harsh winter.
Overwintering nucs is probably the better option if you can find enough bees to make them up.

[mbc]

So we are back to rearing queens in the autumn and overwintering them for sale in the spring. Jon seems to be able to do this with little difficulty so perhaps this is the way forward

Rather than overwintering autumn queens, which is always trickier than spring/summer queens anyway due to logistics of building viable populations, successfully overwintering full stop should be the goal. If people don't lose so many bees, then they won't need so many in the spring. This goal can be worked on through education to improve beekeeping, breeding to improve the stock, and propagating as many good stocks as we need into viable units for overwintering. Unfortunately we are miles behind our continental cousins due to the continuing shortsightedness of our public bee authorities and most of the association's, breeding schemes for our own bees should have been properly organised and funded for over a century now. Obviously winging about it won't change the entrenched apathy, so it's up to enthusiasts to do it, hopefully the internet and better communication will facilitate more cooperation so diverse groups and individuals across the country can all work towards a more sustainable future.

[Pete L]

So we are back to rearing queens in the autumn and overwintering them for sale in the spring.

This is the best thing to do, and i have been trying to encourage more beekeepers to do the same, been doing it for a few years now myself, and with the method i use the losses are very small, winter of 2012/13 lost only two out of eighty queens.

[Jon]

Hi Pete
Out of 80 how many would you use yourself on average and how many would you sell?
I intend to scale up a lot in the future but I usually only try and over winter a dozen or so.

[busybeephilip]

Jon, why not just use the doulble up system with the old apideas that have raised 2 or 3+ queens sold and put a final queen cell in them in the autumn about 2-3 weeks before the drones are due to be kicked out, instead of uniting the bees from the apideas in the autumn. They will have a supply of fresh young workers suitable for overwintering. Of the 100 or so apideas even if 50% are mated and survive this will give you an early supply of queens for sale in the spring and the only extra cost would be feeding.

Even 4 strong apideas could be united to give a viable colony for overwintering in a 2-3 frame standard nuc box

[Pete L]

Hi Jon.....I may sell one or two, but generally i use all of them, some for replacing dud queens in full size colonies and the rest for making up nucs, and doing splits on the stronger double brood colonies in spring. But the system can easily be scaled up to over winter several hundred queens, and i am heading more that way each year, so maybe more to sell, but not for £10 each..lol.

[Poly Hive]

There are more ways of doing nucs than the proverbial cat skinning. The issue is always "the cost". Mini nucs to produce laying queens are wonderful things. They reduce the cost in bees if there is a failure. They reduce the cost whether the cost is real or merely perceived it is there. So rather than make up a full nuc, that is three good brood frames and two good stores I have in the past done this.

BTW not my idea but one a BF friend uses often. One frame of stores with pollen, one frame of brood to which cell is attached, one frame feeder with a pint or two of light syrup. Two or three well covered brood frames shook in. The frames being shook have had their resident queen pinpointed by excluder so no risk of shaking one in. In the event of failure the loss is a few hundred bees and a Q cell. When successful my friend unites in a box of brood and bees in time for the unit to develop some and give a super of heather on the moor. Cost now in credit. Returning to our unit, they would probably struggle to get up to wintering strength in the more northerly areas so probably uniting on a couple of well covered sealed brood frames would get them through winter.

A strong five or preferably a 6 fame poly nuc with a good slab of fondant on top has a very good chance of overwintering.

PH

[Jon]

Phil.
That is pretty much what I was doing combining bees and brood from 3 or 4 apideas into a double unit with 10 frames.
I intended to overwinter a lot more but people kept buying queens right into October which left me with fewer than I intended.

PH. Re using nucs to rear queens, I set up about a dozen of the Paynes polynucs in June, each one with just 1 or sometimes 2 frames of bees and brood. A thick insulated dummy board was put at the edge to keep a well insulated unit. I got 2 mated queens out of most of these and whatever queen was resident in August got to overwinter. I have only lost one of them so far.

[Calum]

This year has been good but I lose most or all of the queens in apideas during a harsh winter.
Overwintering nucs is probably the better option if you can find enough bees to make them up.
Hi
I tried overwintering in apideas - it was unsatisfactory. - never doing it again.
Mini Plus is just minimum size at least for German winters. On a double mini plus is for me optimal.
6 frame colonies are about the least hassle they are big enough to overwinter, and there is no issue of transferring frames to hives with different frame dimensions (I hate rewiring miniplus frames into larger frame sizes)- they also build up of their own accord without any help, they just need a larger hive in time.

Between myself any my apprentices we will sell 60-65 colonies this spring - most are now booked. these were just colonies raised throughout the year as swarm prevention & varroa control. The only real cost is frames foundation and feed. I think we spent about 1800€ on that, but the return is about 9000€ so no complaints.

It is interesting for me about the value of a queen - the prices are about the same as Germany (5€ unmated- 45€ mated with fore and family name) esentially they cost virtually nothing just a but of time and a bit of fun for the beekeeper & a lump of fondant for the apidea.

I'd recommend any beekeeper fill every hive he has with bees for overwintering - if you raise 5 or 20 queens there isnt any more work in it, and flood the home market with home bees that are best adapted to the locality. Where there is an over supply of bees, proper selection of good quality queens diminishes as an issue.

[Jon]

http://beesandnucs.com

Was this not the guy from Weald Farm discussed in many threads on BKF for idiosyncratic business dealings with regard to bee supply. (he said politely)
Might want to be careful with a domain name which could easily be confused with this one.

beesandnucs, nucsandbees which came first the chicken or the egg.

[Adam]

Even 4 strong apideas could be united to give a viable colony for overwintering in a 2-3 frame standard nuc box
I did just that late last summer. 3 or 4 mini-nucs where the brood had emerged added to a frame of brood from a strong colony (plus a queen of course). They were flying well on Wednesday. That's almost a free nuc of bees.

[Adam]

Rather than overwintering autumn queens, which is always trickier than spring/summer queens anyway due to logistics of building viable populations, successfully overwintering full stop should be the goal. If people don't lose so many bees, then they won't need so many in the spring.

I wonder why we accept such high winter losses as normal. I don't see why it should be any more than, say 10 to 15% throughout the country as a whole and it's usually double that.
Generally you need the following and the bees will get through

*Decent hive
*Decent Queen
*Enough food
*Little varroa

The main issue beyond our control is the queen - you do get the odd duff one.

[gavin]

*Decent hive
*Decent Queen
*Enough food
*Little varroa



* decent cohort of healthy young bees raised in the autumn (comes automatically with 1-4 of course in most situations)

[Adam]

* decent cohort of healthy young bees raised in the autumn (comes automatically with 1-4 of course in most situations)

Agreed - and veering of the thread a little (well, a lot) I think that some beekeepers leave varroa treatment too late in autumn so the colony can't clear the viruses in time for winter.

[fatshark]

I wonder why we accept such high winter losses as normal. I don't see why it should be any more than, say 10 to 15% throughout the country as a whole and it's usually double that.
Generally you need the following and the bees will get through

*Decent hive
*Decent Queen
*Enough food
*Little varroa

The main issue beyond our control is the queen - you do get the odd duff one.

I think your bullet points have pretty-much answered your own question though it's rare to see a hive that isn't good enough to get a colony through the winter. You certainly get the odd duff queen, but certainly not 10% if they come from reasonable stock and have headed a colony going into the autumn. I suspect the main reasons are lack of attention to the last two.

I've lost one colony through isolation starvation this winter. A small colony that I should have united in the autumn. Mea culpa. Big colonies certainly starve, but that's almost always just insufficient stores going into the winter.

Low Varroa, and more importantly low virus levels, are critical. I think it's really important to get the Varroa treatment (which often stops the queen from laying) finished and still have warm enough weather for another round or so of brood rearing. I prefer to take the summer crop off early, slap the Apiguard on, add fondant - which doesn't stuff the brood box out too fast - and let them use the balsam and ivy for themselves.

Actually, I might go so far as to say that winter losses in excess of the 10-15% you suggest are largely due to poor bee husbandry (perhaps other than the odd marauding black bear that Michael Palmer has to cope with).

One local "beekeeper" asked me for a 12kg block of fondant in mid/late November last year and - at the same time - asked whether it was too late to treat with Apiguard :eek: I don't known if his colony has made it through the winter.

[busybeephilip]

Here is a new (new for me) site

http://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/devon-british-black-bee-project/

[Adam]

Here is a new (new for me) site

http://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/devon-british-black-bee-project/

Spend £xx and you get a packet of seeds....

There was an old man from Leeds
Who swallowed a packet of seeds
From out of his bum
A geranium come
And from out of his ears came weeds.

[Pete L]

The project has just been closed due to lack of interest.


Many thanks to those who have backed this project, but we have reluctantly decided to close it, after our initial promotion effort failed to achieve our expectations. Rather than wasting time pushing it harder and risking over-exposure, we have decided to re-launch at a later date with a more modest proposal, which we hope you will still support.

Meanwhile, we will be continuing with our work with the Black Bees and you are more than welcome to make a contribution to Friends of the Bees to help us, once your funds have been released from Crowdfunder.
Thank you again for your willingness to support Friends of the Bees.

Phil Chandler

[Calum]

I've lost one colony through isolation starvation this winter. A small colony that I should have united in the autumn. Mea culpa. Big colonies certainly starve, but that's almost always just insufficient stores going into the winter.

I never unite - you are uniting more troubles with a good colony often enough. - you also unite the varroa!
Better wright size the hive (4-6 frames can make it through - even a mini plus will make it) I have 4 & 6 frame hives, or you can just insert a wooden dummy to take up the space.

[fatshark]

You do unite the Varroa, but if they've been treated and are low on brood and have no obvious DWV (or other disease) I don't think there's an issue with uniting. It's straightforward to overwinter 5 frame nucs and - with quite a bit more care - mini-nucs like Kielers. However, in all cases I think it's easier and preferable to overwinter a colony that's building up going into the winter, rather than one that's dwindling.

In my experience weak colonies going into the winter - if they survive - start the spring weak and build up, if at all, slowly. I'd prefer to use the bees in the autumn.

[busybeephilip]

Wonder if people get their money back, there was at least £2000 raised according to the web site. Not sure how topbar hives fit into a high turnover queen rearing operation and I somehow thought somerset area was big into buckfast.

[Wmfd]

Wonder if people get their money back, there was at least £2000 raised according to the web site.

I think it depends on how the project was set up. If it was 'all or nothing' then I think the platform returns the pledges, but if it was 'flexible' then they wouldn't.

I assume from the blurb that it is all or nothing but it isn't that obvious.

David

[madasafish]

Wonder if people get their money back, there was at least £2000 raised according to the web site. Not sure how topbar hives fit into a high turnover queen rearing operation and I somehow thought somerset area was big into buckfast.

I read the biobees thread on the rearing system.

He was going to use mininucs and the Nicot system. No topbar hives used at all.

A number of the regulars were quite upset at that. I think the word is "hypocrisy".

I no longer frequent the site having had a dose of Mr Chandlers ire for comparing topbar hives unfavourably with Langstroths and poly hives. He was rather rude..

[Jon]

You would be a long time propagating a good number of queens without the use of some kind of Mini nuc.
I support PC's initiative re. the native bee and I always thought it was crazy that you could buy a package of Carnica, throw it in a top bar hive and call yourself a natural beekeeper.
The focus on the native bee seemed to make a lot of the regulars very uncomfortable as it has never got much of an airing.
The traditional focus on the shape of the bee container is very much a side issue as far as I am concerned.
It was interesting to see the complete lack of traction for any pro conservation argument.

[The Drone Ranger]

Having sold a few bee hives in the past I would suggest it's not as easy as it seems :)
You get messed around a lot and need the patience of a saint

[Calum]

you can get messed about, but usually they are there because they want a colony. If you say its ok, dont worry, if you dont like the colony for sale, I have a couple of other people interested, they usually cut to the chase.
I hate beekeepers that hold court about how their methods are the best - but they are buying colonies from me..... so cant be that brilliant or they would be selling themselves.. :D

[Greengage]

Whatever happened to that site http://www.sbai.org.uk/sbai_forum/showthread.php?1919-New-site-coming-to-your-screen-soon/page8&highlight=commercial+beekeeping looks like it never got off the ground.
The other one http://beesandnucs.com/wp/ has not been updated since March 2014. There was me excited about an earlier post talking about 2K profit from a couple of insects looks like I choose the wrong career earlier in life.
£30 for a queen 300 queens =£3000 pounds tax free converted to euros thats €4131 nice, Nucs @ €120 a couple of hundred of them say 300 thats €36000 plus the queens gives a grand total of €40131 tax free. All done on Facebook, Im off just to hand in my notice.:cool:
I had an interesting discussion with a commercial fisherman from the North earlier in the year he was telling me about fishing on a commercial scale and I was flabbergasted by the money and where he was fishing, i told him about beekeeping and he started doing figures for me I laughed thought he was pulling my leg, where is his number now.

[Jon]

Rearing queens in the UK or Ireland is a labour of love as opposed to a lucrative business although you can turn a profit at it if you know what you are doing.

The serious work starts in March getting the drone colonies ready but you only have about 3 months for sales - mid June to mid September.
I have hardly had a free day in the past 3 months.
If you are in Southern Europe it must be a lot easier with the longer season and the better weather.
Rearing even 300 mated queens is a hell of a lot of work and that is going to generate about £10,000 minus running expenses such as feed, cages, postage etc.
You also need to spend a few thousand quid to set up to get a sufficient number of mini nucs.
If you talk to any of the queen rearers in Ireland they will tell you it is easier to make a profit from selling honey than from raising queens.
Aoife Nic Giolla Coda will tell you as much.

[Jon]

The other option of selling nucs, again superficially it looks easy and fairly lucrative but anytime I have sold nucs I find that the purchaser thinks he is also buying a couple of years aftercare which involves me sorting out ongoing problems during that period. That's ok if you only sell the odd one but if you are going to do it as a business you can't give away your time free of charge like that.

[Greengage]

A jon your trying to put me off the lucrative market.
1. First off ill have 3 queens for sale, Buckfast €20, Carolina €25 and AMM €30, ill use the false comparasion trick using the first two ill set a base rate then emphasise the benifits of the AMM result Sold AMM
2. Create the illusion of demand eg when you Phone "if operators are busy please call again" rather than saying Operators are waiting please call, this creates the illusion that we are busy and everyone wants to buy my bees.
3. Bundle the costs an example of this is if your buying a tree for the garden the best time to sell you a stake is when you are commited to spending some money any way, I would also sell you a tree tie, Potting compost, if i thought you had money maybe a spade and wheelbarrow, same for bees Bees, Nuc, Hive, floor food etc...........
4. Induce feelings of obligations, when people get something for nothing the feel oblidged to return the favour, give you money.
There is an art to selling you just have to press the right buttons.
Just look what Amazon did to the book selling market......... lets hope Jeff bezos does not get into this market, ill give him a call as were friends on facebook.:cool:

[Jon]

Selling native queens is easy. I can sell everything I produce without even advertising widely.
But if you are working as a sole trader there is a limit to how much work you can fit into a day.
The bit involving grafting and checking apideas is the easy bit.
Anyone with a bit of experience could do 100 grafts in less than an hour.
Getting mated queens into cages with 6 or 7 workers and posting them and dealing with all the customer e-mails takes a lot of time.

Very enjoyable work but I have not worked out how to get rich quick yet. :cool:

[busybeephilip]

You'll just have to double/treble your output and get an acre of land for all them apideas ! Might not be such a bad idea there is plenty of farmers willing to take income for land that is just growing grass !

[prakel]

But if you are working as a sole trader there is a limit to how much work you can fit into a day

...and then you pick up an injury just as the season's starting to get going.

[prakel]

Carolina €25

They sounded so good that my grasshopper mind stumbled on this:

South Carolina Beekeepers Queen Rearing

https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCoQFjABahUKEwjM39OZqerHAhUB0hoKHTMXD4g&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.scstatebeekeepers.org%2FQueen Rearing&usg=AFQjCNG1qgiKuhxpfXAbZI48FpatKztocQ&sig2=fD-5PCyOwv8f1LFfOaK55A&bvm=bv.102022582,d.d2s

Quite a nice read which also includes this link to a short pdf that some here will like:

Failing queens-- Hope from local sources by Andrew Rausch

http://www.scstatebeekeepers.org/Resources/Documents/Newsletter/Failing%20queens%20by%20A%20Rausch.pdf

Apologies to PH for the serious thread drift.

[Greengage]

I could apply for one of the Apprenticeship jobs with Jon.

[gavin]

I could apply for one of the Apprenticeship jobs with Jon.

As long as you are about 18 years old, not related to any living bee farmer, not an accountant or scientist, and Jon is a BFA member! ;)

Jon has enough colonies now if he is interested. He would still need to find two people, one to propose and one to second!

[Jon]

I thought you need about 150 colonies. I only have about 50 and a load of Apideas.

Prakel, you are not kidding about picking up an injury. The bad back I have really cramps my style.

[gavin]

20-39 - associate membership
40 upwards - full membership in various tiers

http://beefarmers.co.uk/join-the-bee-farmers-association/

[Greengage]

Whats the definition of a colony.

[prakel]

Whats the definition of a colony.

Good question. For example, I wonder whether the BFA definition (for membership purposes) is the same as the BBKA's definition for eligibility to their Public Liability Insurance?

[Charlie]

Interesting thread, sorry to have missed it earlier in the year.

We rear a lot of queens and produce a lot of nucs for sale each year, we do it because we enjoy it and it contributes to our income. All of our bees are home reared here in the South of England which does limit the scope we have to produce more to meet early season demand.
We don't handle any imports at all, but I can see why people do, quite simply it's easy money. No real work, no real risk.

The trouble is that QUALITY home bred Bees & Queens are undervalued in our market in relation to the costs of production, certainly either queens or nucs that have been overwintered demand a significant premium over spring production. Anyone who sells them cheap is not in it to earn a living for sure.

We also differentiate our nuc prices on frame size, a 14x12 is 1/3 bigger than a standard national for example, so more brood, more bees and more stores. Surely that has to demand a premium.


Sipa

[SDM]

We also differentiate our nuc prices on frame size, a 14x12 is 1/3 bigger than a standard national for example, so more brood, more bees and more stores. Surely that has to demand a premium.


Sipa

Not really, other than the difference in equipment costs, there's very little value in an extra thousand or so bees.
The value is in the healthy colony headed by a suitable queen. Nobody would pay an extra 25% for a 5frame nuc over a 4 frame nuc, especially when the extra bees only represent a matter of a few days in spring.

[Adam]

Not really, other than the difference in equipment costs, there's very little value in an extra thousand or so bees.
The value is in the healthy colony headed by a suitable queen. Nobody would pay an extra 25% for a 5frame nuc over a 4 frame nuc, especially when the extra bees only represent a matter of a few days in spring.

I think it depends on the size and quality of the nuc. There have been reports of '5 frame' nucs being sold with foundation and few bees; othertimes a nuc can have several frames of sealed brood that's ready for rapid increase in size.

[SDM]

I would love to see a nuc that overwintered on foundation, I was working on the presumption that a 5 frame nuc would have 5 frames of bees on drawn comb with 2 frames of brood minimum. The comments were only on the difference in value between 14x12 and standard. If we presume both a standard and a 14x12 with 5 frames of bees and simillar brood/stores/ arrangements then i dont see much value in the extra bees in the 14x12.
Out of interest Charlie , how much extra do you charge for a 14x12 ( not 33% surely)?