You can link here. There's a difference between linking to somewhere to answer a question like Bridget's or the bee suit thread for that matter and what our Slovakian friend is trying to do in promoting his own business. The rule there is simple, take out an advert in the Scottish Beekeeper first.
While I think some of the info on Wikipedia is a bit suspect in this area they do have some reasonable information on most of the main subspecies with photos which helps a lot.
There's quite a good explanation about the various races of bees on the BIBBA web site:
http://www.bibba.com/origins_milner.php
Although there are no pictures.
Rosie
I believe Bibba has plans afoot to get breeder queens out to some of the local breeding groups. There was some discussion of this, admittedly mostly in the bar, at the Scottish Centenary event.Originally Posted by prakel
I suggested that people supplying queens could pass on the queens they grafted from in the previous season.
I have a queen I grafted from all summer and I have load of nucs and requeened colonies headed by her daughters.
That rules her out for me as a breeder next year but a queen like this with proven offspring would be very useful to another queen rearer outside my local area.
Last edited by Jon; 25-09-2012 at 07:22 PM.
This could be an interesting development -so long as they've spent all of those preceeding years improving their stock to the point that it's now of a high quality and actually worth breeding from rather than just 'being' amm. I'm sure that that is the case but it's hard to tell without having actually seen what their breeding programme has so far achieved.
Last edited by prakel; 25-09-2012 at 08:13 PM.
The best queen to graft from has got to be one of the same race you work with which has already produced dozens of daughters which head docile and productive colonies.
This is likely to be a queen in her 3rd season.
I grafted from at least 7 or 8 queens this year but nearly all the grafts for the queen rearing group came from a single queen.
I had 6 apideas at the association apiary and I got 9 queens from them which were mostly used to requeen colonies at the apiary.
A lot of them are still nuc sized but so far so good with regard to temperament and character.
I can assure you the SBA does not encourage local queen rearing! I have asked on a few occations to advertise in the SBA mag and have been turned down saying they do not want to advertise my Queens that are bred and mated here in Scotland not sure why
Missed this post initially.
Seems a rather strange approach to take regarding a local producer.
The person who organises the advertising for the magazine is a very strong advocate of the SBA's policy of only accepting advertising for bees that are understood to be locally bred stock, honestly presented. I'm sure that if this vendor was able to make a convincing case that his bees were in that category, his advertising revenue would be gratefully received.
I would think that if anyone told porkie pies in their ad. they would be liable to prosecution by trading standards.
What do you need to do convince the decision maker?
We had a local dealer who advertised 'Irish Carnica - for easy handling' in one of the bee publications.
Presumably Irish according to the Jackie Charlton criteria unless Ireland has drifted about 1000 miles to the east.
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