SBA Hive beetle Any progress?

[prakel]

An Italian posted on our Facebook group that the beetle is now widespread in southern Italy. Austrian and German beekeepers have been wintering colonies in the area.

I've seen quite high figures for the number of German colonies which get overwintered in the area (related by a German beekeeper on another forum). It would be interesting to know what the current state of play is -did they get their hives shipped South this year before the beetles were discovered and if so, are those colonies still there? I can visualise problems for the Germans next summer if so many colonies are held on a stand-still order until the end of May -by when presumably at least some of them will be infested.

[Duncan]

Question is - did they take it to Germany in the spring of 2014? Probably and it just hasn't been detected yet. Presumably these colonies were all moved around without any official paperwork and their present whereabouts is unknown to the veterinary services.

[Calluna4u]

There was vigorous advertising on the Internet from 2013 with a price of between 11 and 15 euros. They must be bad businessmen to sell something for 11 when they could easily get 25.

Sorry? At 25 euros it would only be a niche market. 11 to 15 euros is just about spot on for the queens available from much of southern Europe. It is NOT an exceptional price. 12 euros in Italy, the rate going for highly selected stock bred from mothers of the clients choice, is just about the going rate, even a couple of euros less if you are happy to take ligustica type, which I was offered, and rejected, at just a shade under 9 euros. 12 euros at source translates into something like 15 to 17 pounds at UK retail level with all costs, including recaging, queen only transferred to new cage with local workers, and cages and workers from the shipments destroyed (or sent to SASA from now on), plus traders risk of losses during the process allowed for. With the competition in the main breeding areas 25 euros is pure pie in the sky. Yes, some breeders can get that for a relatively low number of queens, especially if there is something unusual about them, but they do need a background story to prize that extra out of peoples pockets. 'Relatively low' btw is a figure in the low thousands in the queen trade, and talking about breeders annual production, not order size. We are not talking about amateur or small scale numbers here. Breeders supplying smaller orders NEED the extra just to cover the not inconsiderable cost of servicing that scale of client.

One breeder I visited does 90,000 queen cells a year and states he is not anywhere near the biggest. (Nor is he anywhere near the SHB)

Another breeder offered to graft from my own chosen Scottish stock, mate them in a black bee area near the Med coast west of Monaco (so in France, but this is an Italian), and supply back at 12 euros. (Not done btw!) Bad businessmen? No, they need the volume to live from, in most years the demand is there, and that is the rate charged by their competitors. You can get the same sort of price from Spain, Portugal, Slovenia, Poland, Czech republic, Romania, Bulgaria and probably more.

Then you have the proven breeder queen market......and that's a totally different ball game. 300 pounds would not be ridiculous.

The queen trade is all about horses for courses, production scale and client sizes, and the commitment and ability of the breeder to meet customers needs.

[Calluna4u]

Question is - did they take it to Germany in the spring of 2014? Probably and it just hasn't been detected yet. Presumably these colonies were all moved around without any official paperwork and their present whereabouts is unknown to the veterinary services.

I have been in contact with my main man in the area this morning and he is going to ask around about this. First reaction was that this is a myth, at least as far as Calabria is concerned, but if anyone can find out he will. Germany is the main destination of Italian packages however and queens bred from German or Austrian mothers are the normal type supplied with them, although a high number of queenless booster packages are also shipped.

[mbc]

90,000 cells, 9€ a queen, the mind boggles at some of these figures and it truly highlights how marginal and "rare breed" our beekeeping must appear to outsiders, all the more reason to do all we can to persevere and protect what we do have imho(in my humbled opinion!).

[Michael Palmer]

Question is - did they take it to Germany in the spring of 2014? Probably and it just hasn't been detected yet. Presumably these colonies were all moved around without any official paperwork and their present whereabouts is unknown to the veterinary services.

Having SHB show up in my apiaries from neighbors with package bees and nucs from the southern US, I would say that if there were colonies of bees from Germany wintering in the infested region of Italy, there are SHB in Germany.

[fatshark]

New Year Resolution … prepare a few SHB traps from Correx …

20141231-0010.jpg

I'm scaling up

Happy New Year

[gavin]

Wot?! No blood on the floor? Ah .... you've covered the stains in cardboard.

Wishing everyone an Aethina-free New Year.

[prakel]

I have been in contact with my main man in the area this morning and he is going to ask around about this. First reaction was that this is a myth, at least as far as Calabria is concerned, but if anyone can find out he will.

Any news on this?

[Calluna4u]

Nothing firm yet. He is in Sicily on holiday with one of the bee breeders there at the moment, but we will be talking in the next few days once he returns to Piemonte. Wintering in Italy is not unknown, and not the sole preserve of Germans. The SHB area (linked Sicily cases apart) is actually tiny, as I posted elsewhere it can be fitted into the Carse of Gowrie between Perth and Dundee, and he, and his contacts down there, think it unlikely there were wintering bees there last winter, and even if they were it would be doubly unlucky to have been in that area, where most migration was essentially regional and for the orange blossom flow.