Companies like Paynes and Bickerstaffe must make a good margin on a high volume of imported queens.
Not sure what they would be paying per queen for bulk orders but it is likely less than £10 and they are sold on at about £40.
Can you produce 1000 queens on your own or is that a team/family effort.
I have been trying to work out how many queens a sole trader could produce in the UK over an average summer but 1000 is way above my estimate.
The NZ queen raisers must be rubbing their hands. I can't see any bee health reason for denying NZ imports given that the EU has already agreed their standards are good enough for imports, and that Canterbury is 18,500 km from Gioia Tauro.
Could produce a lot more, and no i don't do it on my own, have three of my sons working with me full time, but that is not just on the queen rearing obviously... Michael Collier produces a lot of queens, runs well over a thousand mating nucs, maybe two now, and he works mostly on his own, and has a full time job elsewhere... or did last time i was at his place a couple of years ago.Originally Posted by Jon
But as Pete says, overwintering combined with an organised system of production over the summer could take up a lot of the slack.
Bibba should step up to the plate. Any comments Rosie?
Pop an imported queen with a couple of frames of brood and the profit jumps up dramatically. I'd guess most "UK" produced nucs are made up like this, nice little earner if you don't worry about the environmental pollution aspect of importing queens.
I find the bottlenecks to production are mundane things such as marking queens and putting them in a cage with half a dozen attendants.
If you have to take each queen from an apidea or mini nuc that takes time even if you can do each one in a few minutes.
Stocking the mini nucs takes the most time, and failures are the biggest waste of time, I think that is what makes british isles queen breeding uneconomic, the often comparatively high failure rate. That's what hurts me the most anyway, I reckon.
Most of our mini nucs don't need stocking, they are run all year round, and split in spring complete with bees and brood to increase the numbers...and those numbers rise really fast in spring.
But once they are stocked you should get 2 or 3 cycles out of them.
This summer was great apart from August. I lost weak apideas to wasps in August and because of the rain I had a few drone layers.
But yea, filling mini nucs is near enough the worst job in beekeeping. I hate it.
Balmy Devon. Not so easy in Belfast
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