Quote Originally Posted by gavin View Post
This is back to a key argument, thanks. Overwintering nucs for the spring empty boxes or for sale. If you do this well and overwinter strong units in polystyrene nucleus boxes, they overwinter really well. Almost as well as full boxes. It is possible to set them up in late summer and, with some care, build them to full units on six frames by the end of the season. It doesn't take a lot of work to do this with natural queen cells or you can make them with a queen of your own choice, either raised by yourself or bought in. You can even requeen late in the season a split made with the old queen as part of your swarm control. That uses some of those late season queens that we hear don't have a ready market.
This is a significant component of Michael Palmer's Sustainable Apiary talk of course ... available at a YouTube site near you. You know it, I know it, most of the readers of - and certainly the regular contributors to - this forum know it. But how many actually do it? In an association apiary just a few miles south of your own there's a solitary poly nuc, but lots of hives. In my previous BKA shared apiary there was probably a 10:1 ratio of hives to nucs over the winters I used it. In my experience even experienced beekeepers relatively rarely overwinter nucs.

It can't be due to lack of suitable equipment as the currently available poly nucs are extremely good and inexpensive enough to pay for themselves in a season or two through sales of surplus (note that this is hobbyist economics, not the cold hard reality of commercials )

The combination of better preparation for the winter (in terms of timely Varroa treatment and feeding) coupled with training in preparation and overwintering of nucs might well fill that 20% shortfall in Scottish Association nuc demand your report describes.