In message <[log in to unmask]>, Robert Brenchley <[log in to unmask]> writes > Where do you advertise your queens? How many do you sell indvidually, >and how many end up heading nucs which you sell? If you compare the number of >ads for queens in the US beekeeping press with the number in the UK press, >you'll see what I mean! It's OK. From the LOL I put you would note that I was amused rather than offended in any way. Of course it utterly tiny compared to the US/Aus/NZ/Argentina etc etc scale. I don't advertise and I make no claims for either the queens or the nucleii in terms of any racial purity or any fancy pedigree. They are just our tough local bees, the ones we use ourselves in our production hives. I can easily sell all I have to spare and have several takers for every nucleus I can offer. All done privately and by word of mouth, and I dont sell nucs in units of less than 10 at a time plus the buyer has to collect. This is for no other reason than I don't have time to deal with a nuc or two at a time, plus dish out the free advice that of necessity goes with it for half an hour to every caller. > There's nobody visible enough to really be considered >'large-scale'. 2000+ may be a lot, Don't confuse visibility with scale or quality. Ask Bob. Even in the US some of the breeders are virtually invisible if all you do is a web search or a read of the US bee press. > but I don't have the impression that this is >the mainstay of your business! I may, of course, be wrong. No, of course you are not wrong. Queens and nucs are a by product of having surplus bees and queens and bring me some extra personal cash. The main function of the breeding of the queens is for our own needs. The nucs area different matter and I currently have 140 overwintering and I get a pollination fee on those in March/April for fruit tunnels then the good ones are sold or used in any dead outs we may have, and the dinks given the chop ready for filling with fresh nucs in May. We get 2 crops of nucs a season out of those boxes. FWIW I don't charge fancy UK prices either, which is in part because I like the buyer to have a chance that buying my bees/queens will be a viable exercise and thus likely to return for more in future, and partly to ensure the orders are mainly from professionals or amateur groupings who will take enough of them to make it worth my time. 2008 nucs were GBP 60, queens GBP 16. 2009 nucs are GBP 70 and I already have offers to buy more than I can produce, and queens are GBP 18 and already 100 queens are booked to the English Midlands, just a few miles east of you. > > I need to do some morphometrics on my bees to see how close they really >are to the near-Amm I started with, but black bees are definitely the >exception round here, so if there was a significant amount of >outcrossing, I'd >expect it to show over a few years. You are ahead of me on that one. I have never done any morphometry and probably never will. Its fine detail that does not really concern me as all I want are robust vigorous and hard working bees. In our climate this invariably means dark but does not HAVE to mean Amm. We do see characteristics in colonies that show race specific traits (ie the melanistic drones from a previous post) that tell us certain bees have a good bit of race x or y in them, but the actual mix is unimportant so long as the results are good. I have never noticed any of the reputed problems attributed to crosses, in fact crosses are often great. Dark phase NWC virgins (see earlier posts about open mating and Italian drones. Only choose the dark ones as they have an NWC dad as well) crossed on local dark bees ( which are predominantly Amm) is a truly excellent cross, and its vigour takes two or three generations to revert back to the local mean. > It's been very noticeable that my queen >raising efforts only succeed when I have plenty of drones available in my own >apiary, which again suggests that outcrossing isn't that big a factor. >We have, of >course, had a couple of vile summers, which won't have encouraged queens to >fly far. It has indeed been awful. Almost zilch mated in June both years, and those that were were prone to failure, either by supercedure at just weeks old, or by turning drone layer in the first winter. >But you're quite right, I need to look closely, and I've been >putting it off since I had a couple of colonies I bought in (not a >good decision!) >and the presence of these bees would have skewed the results. It'll have to >wait till spring, by which time the last of thise bees will thankfully >be long >gone. I would say just persist with the bees you like, no matter what the morphometry says. Its all a bit nazi to me, perfectly good bees rejected because their wing venation is not as desired. I am a perfectly happy local strain/mongrels owner. -- Murray McGregor **************************************************** * General Information About BEE-L is available at: * * http://www.honeybeeworld.com/bee-l/default.htm * ****************************************************