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No, perfectly legal, in fact one guy importing them was a bee inspector.
Package Bees - sourced from the Czech Republic. A package of approximately 10,500 - 11,000 bees and a caged, mated 2010 Carniolan Queen. Supplied in a correx plastic box (which can be adapted as a 'nuc' box to take 5 British National Standard Brood Frames.)
This may be where the confusion is coming from (my highlight).Quote:
Im pretty sure that UK legislation states that any workers imported with queens are removed and sent to NBU for testing. So no packages, nucs or full hives are allowed in anyway.
https://www.gov.uk/bee-health
Quote:
Post-import controls
When you receive a consignment of imported queen honeybees from one of the eligible countries outside the EU, you must:
•transfer the queens to new queen cages before introducing them to local colonies
•send the NBU the queen cages, attendant worker bees and other material that came with the queen bees from their country of origin, within five days of receiving them
Are they certified disease-free? How do we stop it?
[QUOTE=Easy beesy;15319]Are they certified disease-free? What checks are done? Is it only bee inspectors allowed? How do we stop it?
Sorry - little phone buttons, clumsy thumbs!
Apparently yes, and with health certificates, which is more than you get in this country.Quote:
Originally Posted by Easy beesy
From a post by ITLD on BKF, just to give you a clue as to numbers imported.
The 300 packages are in one year, and being divided in two once here with an extra queen (hence the 600 figure), but represent only a small fraction of the supplies coming in. Consignments of similar and larger size are arriving as well, mostly going to beekeepers in southern and eastern England. Numbers communicated to me by two shippers alone runs to 3124 units. ( 6 loads of 400, one airline pallet of 704 ) I know SOME of the destinations. There are many shippers.
Even with a health certificate there is a massive risk if those figures are accurate.
All it takes is one package where a pathogen or mite is overlooked and we will have another bee disease to deal with.
The risks involved when importing packages of bees must be far greater than those associated with importing just queens - and I don't see the need for that either. Maybe one or two queens to specialist breeders like Pete would be a relatively low risk but certainly not thousands distributed the length and breadth of the country to every hobby beekeeper who happens to fancy trying a new queen.
The varroa mites in Ireland did not swim over the Irish sea and we have them here due to imported bee colonies.
I totally agree Jon, health certificates are only as good as the rigorousness of the inspections at the other end and checks at our border inspection points are laughably unprofessional, there just arent any qualified staff when it comes to something like bees. The only realistic chance of keeping anything out is having a ban on imports or much tighter border control.
I think that NZ is probably one of the better countries with regard to biosecurity and such-like and I would feel more confident of their inspection regime than in some other countries.....
But mistakes do happen.
The fact that the beekeeper who lost 300 colonies to varroa (PMS) and AFB rather than "CCD" shows how easy some can be fooled.