New site coming to your screen soon

[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 !