Hi All

Michael Palmer wrote the bits that I quote from, my comments amplify
what was said rather than opposing his points.

> But, is acceptance the name of the game? Or is it quality?

This is not a simple trade-off, the cost of a cell may be low, but if
the quality is not as you would like, your management costs will be
higher for the same reward, which sounds like hard work for nothing.

 > I hear it over and over again.
 > "I haven't the time to raise my own cells."

So you spend dollars that might go towards feeding your family, on
queens that were raised in a different location, these queens do not
perform as well as the queens that you would have raised yourself, so
your honey yield is lower than it would have been, which means even less
dollars to feed the family. Does this make economic sense ?

> You can always raise better queens from your best stock, than
> you can buy in from far away.
 >...>
 > there should be no reason to buy
 > in stock...except perhaps for a breeding program.


We have come full circle... this portion of the thread started when my
friend Chris, pointed out that "I don't think I know anybody who buys
queens and packages (except for a few Amm enthusiasts who may get some
get a queen from Micheal Mac Giolla Coda in Ireland and then rear their
own.)"

That is about the size of the situation in UK, most raise their own
queens, but will only buy in 'breeding stock'. I used to be a bee
breeder myself, always striving for a better bee, in all of my
beekeeping I have only bought about a dozen queens, all of which were
purchased with a particular trait or behaviour that I wished to explore
and propagate. In addition to the purchases there was a good deal of
swapping with others who were also breeding.

Apart from the breeding work I also used to raise queens for sale, this
was never a large scale like in US, because there was no point in
supplying outside of my local area. My reputation was important to me
and had I sent queens far afield they would be unlikely to perform as
well as expected and criticism would be levelled at me about quality. I
hear such criticisms made against queen suppliers in US. It is not that
the queens are duff, they just do not fit the geographic location that
they are expected to perform in.

If early queens are important in your management strategy, then you can
raise them the previous season and as Mike points out over winter them,
there is some overhead in nuc boxes or divided brood boxes to achieve
it, but the nucs themselves are largely self supporting and require very
little in the way of labour, especially as the nuc raising can be done
when other work is not so heavy.

> Only takes a few years to
> work it into your seasonal management.

Yes, it does take a 'few' years, but those years are in step with the
learning curve and you will have a better beekeeping business after the
years have been spent. But do not think of it as a final solution, there
will always be new tweaks that you can add to make the system even more
efficient.

I'll finish with a quote, but I could just as well have said the words
myself.

> And then you'll wonder how you got along so long on those
 > bought queens you just had to have...because you
> could buy them a couple months earlier than you could raise them.


Regards & Best 73s, Dave Cushman, G8MZY
http://website.lineone.net/~dave.cushman or http://www.dave-cushman.net
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