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Thread: Scottish Government report on the 'Restocking Options' study

  1. #91
    Senior Member fatshark's Avatar
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    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.

  2. #92

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    Quote Originally Posted by Finno View Post
    Agreed; I write as a small scale hobbyist and supporter of the native bee in Ireland and it was a pleasant surprise to see this issue discussed without the usual sneering and contempt found on most fora. Especial thanks to to C4u for his elucidation of the economic forces at work.
    LOL....Well its about the time of year where I vanish into the ether as far as bee forums are concerned...we have already started moving hives to the OSR, have to, as we would never get finished on time otherwise. So soon I will not be around to ruffle feathers <G>. Back again once the evenings start drawing in.

    Interesting that the ideal solution being discussed.....the production of abundant local nucs...........is exactly the route we are going down but which is also fraught with issues about its viability. In the seasons it is needed its the most likely to have poorer results.....in the years it works nobody needs it. That's the big catch of focussing only on 'local'.................both the client and the producer face the same issues with weather and losses or lack thereof.

  3. #93
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    Its been said before, the game changer here is the poly nucs, they're bloody great at overwintering, and building up, small colonies. I hazard to say it, but they are particularly suited to native bees with their smaller wintering clusters. I think once their ease of use and high success rate gets embedded in association culture then beekeepers will adopt them on mass, and producing their own replacements and some surplus for sale will become second nature, thus eclipsing the need for large scale imports.

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