Scottish Government report on the 'Restocking Options' study

[prakel]

Really? Where will their selected breeding stock come from?

Are any of the UK queen breeders approaching the task using Instrumental Insemination prakel ?

DR, I've quoted from both of our posts as I'm assuming that you're referring to that specific part of my post... that being the case then the answer must surely be yes. But, I'm totally ignorant as to how successful they are in establishing sound lines which are worth spending money on or how easy it is to get hold of queens from them although I have been on a few waiting lists for British queens over the years without actually ever getting to the top. I've also had a breeder refuse to sell to me on the grounds that I live in the wrong area.

I have opinions on the instrumental insemination too, but you directed that to prakel so I will hold me tongue on that.

Please don't, not on my account. I'm too inexperienced to comment on the finer points of II queens. But I'm keen to try and learn from your own experience if you'd care to elaborate.

[The Drone Ranger]

It's a question of control because isolated mating is not generally available in UK
I get the impression that the biggest queen producers use II
I'm happy to be told they don't


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[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]

Please don't, not on my account. I'm too inexperienced to comment on the finer points of II queens. But I'm keen to try and learn from your own experience if you'd care to elaborate.

I am sensitive to the fact that it could be seen as some kind of attempt to saturate the forum, and do not enter any more than a few of the threads I could. The poster specifically addressed you, so left it at that.

However, the increasing use of II does concern me rather. I fear it is becoming too much used in situations where it is less than optimal to do so and is a risk factor for causing inbreeding issues.

I know its not the most popular opinion round here but the heavy focus in on one ideal model of bee and promoting the idea of maintaining it, even in small scale units, by II is a real danger to genetic diversity. Vigour and population resistance to threats come from that very diversity that seems to be in the crosshairs of those with a narrow idea of what bee we should have, and even small beekeepers with half a dozen hives are being encouraged to do II, and to spend a lot of money on insemination gear and training.
I do not consider this to be safe or wise.

I have had II queens several in the past. They are less easy to introduce and less likely to be excellent. They CAN be and we have had some really excellent II queens that went on for years, but among II queens it was maybe 30% or a bit less, and with naturally mated it was much better.

To me II is a breeding tool. It is best used to produce mother queens of known quality and lineage, from which grafting is done and normal production queens are then open mated to a gene pool of many lines. Brood fertility is best this way. Its main use is thus in producing the breeder queens which are then disseminated among the beekeeping community, either as breeder queens or via their open mated progeny being sold on. The potential loss of sex alleles must always be thought about.

In short I feel it to be a tool that is of great worth but with considerable potential to be used the wrong way and that a genetic bottleneck can happen down the line, and inbreeding can follow from it. It has happened before and will happen again, and the over inbred unit needs a rapid genetic input.

Having said all that, Jolanta WILL be properly trained (abroad) and will be doing II, but ONLY for the production of breeder queens to trial and select from. All queens intended to go out and earn the cash in the field, or be sold on to head working colonies will still be open mated. When paying wages too, its a hopelessly costly process to use II as a main production tool.

[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.

[The Drone Ranger]

As you say C4u I think the truth is there are good and not so good strains in most "breeds" of bees even before you start looking at the variation between different individual queens
Like humans there are loads of non aggressive people but only a few Colin Jackson's
Most folk are happy with a gentle family dog not a Crufts Winner
In bees its not having the bejesus stung out of you and the prospect of some honey that trumps most other considerations
I have a fair few hives so requeening the ill natured ones is no problem
For somebody with just 2 hives though they can't solve ill nature by raising their own queen
The same with lack of vigour 2 hives probably means buying a queen in
Carnies are popular because they have a reputation for being gentle (probably testament to the breeders)
I have one of jon's queens and she hasn't swarmed the bees are gentle and productive
I'm sure yours will be the same

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[prakel]

Most folk are happy with a gentle family dog not a Crufts Winner

I think that people's standards depend on whether they've raised the queen themselves or paid £30/40 for it. Even a free queen given to help someone out can get a rather critical appraisal far beyond what the recipient's own queens receive. Human nature.

[fatshark]

A bit late to the game but I've now read this report ... like others I congratulate Gavin (and all those who contributed) on its thoroughness. The 'queen mating windows' makes particularly interesting reading.

Rather than get embroiled in the imports/commercial etc discussions I'd like to raise the issue of new beekeeper training and nuc/queen demand. The report comments on the 'churn' of members of BKA's, with large numbers being trained every year, yet the overall number of beekeepers in the country not increasing at anything like the same rate. The questionnaire doesn't ask BKA's how many new beekeepers are trained per year, but "up to around 50%" is quoted in the introduction. I think this figure would have been useful - it contains some who abandon beekeeping before ever getting bees, some who acquire bees and potentially acquire heavy losses resulting in them leaving the hobby and some who get bees and keep going. Perhaps these can be divided 33% each - any thoughts?

The report indicates that replacement stocks needed are 20% higher than available (within BKAs) - I'm very surprised the shortfall is as little as this. With large numbers training each year and the relatively high attrition rate of colonies belonging to new beekeepers (personal observation, not in the report) I would have expected the figure needed to be significantly higher.

Is there under-reporting of needs, are beginners more successful than I suggest or are less trained?

My previous association (not Scotland) trained 40-50 per annum (overall association membership ~220-240), but the total membership only increased by ~5% per annum. A significant proportion of those trained, 50-70% perhaps needed bees - sourced from local members, commercial purchases or a well-organised swarm collection system. Inevitably demand for nucs was highest as soon as the season started ... as the beginners courses finished and far too soon for UK-raised colonies to be available. To reduce demand for imports better management of expectations would be needed, re-scheduling of the beginners course and/or "pre-booking" of overwintered nucs. All this requires (time consuming) organisation. My limited experience of helping run queen rearing courses (grafting/mini-nuc based) suggested that it would be better to invest time into smaller scale queen rearing (splits/Snelgrove etc.) training, and the combined and related topics of winter preparation and proper Varroa control.

Better beekeeping reduces demand ... which is both obvious and explicitly stated in summary points 2 and 3 of the report.

[Bumble]

The report comments on the 'churn' of members of BKA's, with large numbers being trained every year, yet the overall number of beekeepers in the country not increasing at anything like the same rate. The questionnaire doesn't ask BKA's how many new beekeepers are trained per year, but "up to around 50%" is quoted in the introduction. I think this figure would have been useful - it contains some who abandon beekeeping before ever getting bees, some who acquire bees and potentially acquire heavy losses resulting in them leaving the hobby and some who get bees and keep going. Perhaps these can be divided 33% each - any thoughts?

My previous association (not Scotland) trained 40-50 per annum (overall association membership ~220-240), but the total membership only increased by ~5% per annum. A significant proportion of those trained, 50-70% perhaps needed bees - sourced from local members, commercial purchases or a well-organised swarm collection system. Inevitably demand for nucs was highest as soon as the season started ... as the beginners courses finished and far too soon for UK-raised colonies to be available. To reduce demand for imports better management of expectations would be needed, re-scheduling of the beginners course and/or "pre-booking" of overwintered nucs. All this requires (time consuming) organisation. My limited experience of helping run queen rearing courses (grafting/mini-nuc based) suggested that it would be better to invest time into smaller scale queen rearing (splits/Snelgrove etc.) training, and the combined and related topics of winter preparation and proper Varroa control.

Our association 'trains' between 30 and 40 each year (runs courses, takes money) but a good third of those don't ever intend to become beekeepers. During the course the ones who did want to become beekeepers learn that it isn't a leave alone hobby, so in the end only about a dozen will stay with the association and start keeping bees.

Timing is off with our course too. It starts in the winter and finishes well before any overwintered nucs or colonies are available, but that's the way it's awlays been done and there's no will to change, yet every year there are complaints from new beekeepers that they're waiting a long time for their bees.

Probably the biggest problem we have is ongoing training and support, because even in a fairly large association there are only a few who are willing to give up their free time to help new beekeepers, so only the more determined new members stay for more than three years.

[madasafish]

Probably the biggest problem we have is ongoing training and support, because even in a fairly large association there are only a few who are willing to give up their free time to help new beekeepers, so only the more determined new members stay for more than three years.

I help our Association with Apiary based training.. and will help individuals when required..
It's a real struggle when people take a colony into winter with little training or experience and wonder why it dies out...

I stopped selling TBH nucs completely to beginners as "natural beekeepers" appear to have more than the usual proportion of ignorants and tend to kill their bees. Those that do overwinter tend to pester their neighbours with swarms..