Peter has a point... Local bees are very hard to obtain here in Northern 
climates, especially early. Beginner beekeepers are in a hurry to start 
their new hobby, so will bring them in from anywhere they can find them, 
usually from California or Texas or Georgia.  The colonies are not well 
adapted to our particular flows, nor our winter so beginners generally 
sustain heavier losses or in many cases, total loss.....and the cycle 
repeats itself until the beekeepers either give up the hobby due to 
cost, or start realizing that local bees have a distinct survival 
advantage...
Meanwhile the commercial beeks, fresh back from pollination out west are 
more than happy to split out their colonies, slap a Southern Italian 
queen in a nuc or package and sell it to the fresh new face in beekeeping.
And the cycle continues.

Even my local bee clubs haven't embraced it yet....they get together to 
make a "large" package purchase from a commercial beekeeper fresh back 
from down South or West to distribute among their membership....what 
they should be doing is creating a network of beekeepers who raise local 
stock to trade off setting mating nucs in their yards among other ideas 
like trading local queen stock.

Kevin M

On 2/10/2019 11:19 AM, Peter wrote:
> Two reasons:
>
> Profit through selling queens and more especially nucs to beginners - buy in cheap queens early (before they can be raised here), then split colonies to make nucs.  Beginners are always in a hurry to get their hands on their first bees and often are not prepared to wait for UK produced stock to be available - despite the cost of these nucs.

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