Scottish Government report on the 'Restocking Options' study

[Calluna4u]

I can't see how Germany and Denmark can produce commercial quantities of queens and UK can't

If imports are stopped though you can be pretty certain that UK queen breeders will emerge to supply the market

Suggesting a new mated Carniolan would be less likely to swarm than an overwintered queen C4u ?
I like Carniolan but wouldn't try and spin that one

1. They don't really, and that's in a really favourable more continental climate than our with much more reliable summer weather. Sure, Ringkobing and Saint Andrews are on the same latitude, but the weather moves, on average, sw to ne in this part of the world, so Denmark has a climate more like Kent. The queens they take to Italy for grafting and mating are selected breeders.

2. Not very likely. Why they have not emerged already, in times when wages and cost were far lower kind of tells its own story. The top guy only claims to manage a maximum of 2000 a season. There are higher claims but they are held in some suspicion.

3. Without shadow of a doubt yes. I don't suggest it. I know it. From direct experience over many years.

However, before this gets misinterpreted.........even NEW season queens can swarm. The idea that they will not is a partial myth, but they are a lot less likely to. You have to compare apples with apples as well. A lower vigour second season queen may indeed be less likely to swarm than a new queen of a more vigorous strain. I prefer to compare like with like.

[mbc]

2. Not very likely. Why they have not emerged already, in times when wages and cost were far lower kind of tells its own story. The top guy only claims to manage a maximum of 2000 a season. There are higher claims but they are held in some suspicion.

.

There has never been a time when home produced queens could be reared at a comparable cost to imports from further south.
If I were honest about my own queen rearing efforts, then I only get about 50% success for all the effort of setting it all up, that is 5 usable queens for every 10 cells grafted, after the attrition of larvae not accepted, virgins not hatching or not getting mated. I believe professional outfits here get a better strike rate, but they are also below some of the success rates achieved further south.
It would take import tariffs or closed borders to make queen rearing here competitive on price with queens raised and mated on the continent.
This isnt going to happen so we need to out compete the imports on something other than cost to make queen rearing on a large scale viable for british producers. I believe sustainability could be our competitive angle, our queens mated by our drones could be far more sustainable in the medium to long term as successive generations are more likely o be stable and useful to us than the progeny of foreign queens mated to our drones.
This scenario would hold more water if we had a uniform(ish) bee of our own, sadly this isnt the case as we've got the hotsh potsh we've got through generations of imports and no central vision for our own queen breeding.
But anyway, the argument that if imports were stopped then uk breeders would emerge to fill the gap is spot on, just never likely to happen.

[Calluna4u]

But anyway, the argument that if imports were stopped then uk breeders would emerge to fill the gap is spot on, just never likely to happen.

I doubt it. there has to be some concept of viability for anyone to do it at sufficient scale. Unless honey prices rise dramatically then high priced queens from the UK are just seen as an increased cost in an already marginal profession.

What would actually happen, as has happened in the past, is if the beekeeper deems it too expensive, and most do not have the time to do queen breeding of any scale on top, is that they will just use their natural cells and have to take what comes out in the mix. Some will set up breeding programmes, other will not and just raise what they can on an ad hoc basis. That has been the British way for a long time, and cutting off the route to early mated laying queens will just institutionalise the way it has been done for years.

We are charging 30 pounds for the home bred new seasons queens. I do not expect many orders from professionals at such a price.

[mbc]

I doubt it. there has to be some concept of viability for anyone to do it at sufficient scale. Unless honey prices rise dramatically then high priced queens from the UK are just seen as an increased cost in an already marginal profession.

What would actually happen, as has happened in the past, is if the beekeeper deems it too expensive, and most do not have the time to do queen breeding of any scale on top, is that they will just use their natural cells and have to take what comes out in the mix. Some will set up breeding programmes, other will not and just raise what they can on an ad hoc basis. That has been the British way for a long time, and cutting off the route to early mated laying queens will just institutionalise the way it has been done for years.

We are charging 30 pounds for the home bred new seasons queens. I do not expect many orders from professionals at such a price.

It would need someone well respected in the game to prove on a large scale that there was a good return on that £30 for a queen

[drumgerry]

Again the focus seems to be that we need large scale queen production for a Scottish solution (I say Scottish as that's what I'm talking about and what Gavin's report is about) to be viable. For 99% of beekeepers the requirement isn't for 100 or 200 or 2,000 queens at a time. Maybe the focus should be shifted away from what the commercial guys need for their business model and instead should be on what would benefit the vast majority of us (who from Gavin's survey seem to own most of the colonies in Scotland). If some of the commercial guys want to hitch on to the back of that all well and good.

[The Drone Ranger]

doubt it. there has to be some concept of viability for anyone to do it at sufficient scale.

We are charging 30 pounds for the home bred new seasons queens. I do not expect many orders from professionals at such a price.

Well if they are from your best stock and they get advertised in SBA mag and BeeCraft you might be pleasantly surprised
If someone ordered 300 queens from you and you could deliver I suspect the price would be a bit flexible ?


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[Calluna4u]

Well if they are from your best stock and they get advertised in SBA mag and BeeCraft you might be pleasantly surprised
If someone ordered 300 queens from you and you could deliver I suspect the price would be a bit flexible ?
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The amateur sector are slow to want these queens and nucs.....until they see them and work with them and then they want more. Almost all the Scottish orders come from folk who have seen with their own eyes, and handled them.

Over 80% of the orders into the Scottish amateur sector came from people who had seen the bees, either at work on the heather or on a group visit to the mating unit, or had been recommended to get them by someone who had.

The climate of political correctness around black bees and 'local' strains is very engrained right now, even though I personally believe a lot of it to be incorrect, and thus, into certain associations, uptake of this stock will be slow or may even never happen. I prefer in that case just to wait for word of mouth to get through, and its no worry if it never does.

Lots of ads are rather BS laden and extol virtues that are, if not imaginary, are at the least inflated. We just sell them as no fancy breed, just our own selected working stock with regular addition of quality breeding material from other units, but the client is told (mark on cage) what line the queen came from, so if they have a favourite they can reorder it while that line still exists.

Referring to the inbreeding threat from II mentioned in previous post, we have strict upper limit of 50 queens from any one line that we will allow to be incorporated into our working unit, and on the face of it up to now (some will be weeded out during the summer if they fail to match up to the standards, and some will be added in) it looks like she will be kicking off with 27 lines this spring, and only about half of these will be heavily used as mothers for larger quantities of production queens, and ALL will also be encouraged to throw a lot of drones. Two production apiaries containing ONLY selected stock will also be placed within close flying distance to the two mating units. We will not be starting the breeding until we see that there will be adequate mature drones of the right lines for the time when the virgins will be flighting.

With the main bee farm as the prime recipient of the stock we have a fairly secure basis for the queens project, so sales in ones and twos are not of great importance. I doubt most of the big guys would feel like giving us 3000 for 100 queens, when they can get 100 very good indeed queens for 1800, and if they rake around can actually get them for 1100 from less proven producers.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I had stopped using the NZ stock for now, well that is only 95% true. We have two old NZ lines in service as lines to graft from. The issue with the NZ stock was of inbreeding at F1 level. We found out too late that all the NZ queens we brought into Aberdeenshire were from only 4 mothers (and even THEIR relatedness was an unknown) so diversity of drones was very poor. Too many virgins were then mating to related drones and the resulting brood was spotty and the vigour declined in about 75% of the stock at F1, sometimes very sharply. Now the basic bees are very good but until the diversity issue is resolved there will be no further import of that stock by me.

Price flexibility? Well only a little. The price is more that I think smaller beekeepers should not be penalised too heavily for just being small. In ones and twos it should be higher but we chose not to. Thus the only difference is that for under 10 queens we charge to P&P. Above that delivery by special delivery is free.