Well what a delightful read and how incredibly generous of you to give us your detailed thoughts with the promise of no reply.
Did you honestly expect me to read all of that and have no reply whatsoever?
I'll try and address your comments and points as you have detailed above. I very much welcome a response!!
You clearly had a vested interest in both of the threads as you pretty much dictated them word for word. I wonder why you have such a vested interest?
The timing of the advert drew a few comments as it would be highly unlikely that an experienced beekeeper would pay so much so late in the season for a nuc that had a much bigger downside and high risk than upside. However new beekeepers making the leap without sound advice could of taken advantage of the offer, its only my opinion but anybody that encourages a new beekeeping to take a Nuc at that time of year without experience doesn’t have the best interest of the beekeeper at heart.
If I only had been giving people the option of late season nucs this would be a fair comment. I offered to overwinter then nucs for an extra £20. I have turned down sales already this autumn to people who clearly werent prepared to overwinter their nucs. I havent taken deposits from them and have invited them to come back in the Spring and take an overwintered nuc.
Next the Buckfast part of the advert was queried. For those that are still trying to work things out, the vast majority of Buckfast Queens are sold as Open Mated F1 Queens. These are Queens taken from a mother of Known Parentage and open mated with the breeder usually doing as much as he can to ensure there are sufficient drones from good quality known stock in the area so good traits will be present. Any queens taken from these queens are then F2 and still regarded as of “Buckfast” descent anything beyond that F3,F4 are just really mongrels imho. I believe some pointed out these were “ Local Hybrids” rather than Buckfast.
Incorrect. The overwintered nucs were F2 buckfast bred from 2017 F1 buckfast. The 20 additional nucs were imported F1 Buckfast from BS Honey Bees - a respected importer of queen bees that fully comply with EU regs.
Following on the 2018 Queens for the Spring Nucs was queried given the availability was May / June implying late May early June delivery. This was clarified to the queens were to be bought in , placed in Nucs by splitting 4 or 5 double brood colonies and taken through a full brood cycle before being sold on. Someone did comment the Queens were cheaper than the normal Buckfast at £45 but slightly cheaper buying 20 at a time. If you back work it for very late May availability for Brood in All Stages you are looking at installing the Queens in Nucs somewhere middle of May at the latest. Given a Queen takes 12 Days to Emerge, 4 days at least to get Flight Ready then mating flights, then several days to come into lay and then however many days the breeder wants to see it laying before delivery and that’s the best scenario at good times with good weather. So minimum you are looking at is 25 days and that’s quick. So the queen would have had to be grafted around the week commencing 16th April. You would be hard pushed to get 20 queens from a breeder that early in this country, not an issue if buying from abroad, Italy, Greece or somewhere and obviously at lower cost. It also assumes that all the queens will survive their introduction and have not suffered any ill effects from travelling and no idea what the bees will be like.
Why not ask the question instead of assuming to know what processes I follow? I feed ultra bee in Feb which means the double broods are absolutely heaving come 1st April. They would swarm mid April if i didnt perform splits. The queens are imported from BS Honey Bees, again a very reputable and compliant importer, and are available from the 1st week in April. Assuming the colonies are split in the first week in April there is a 8/10 week lead in before I promised to fulfil deliveries. It turned out they were ready a lot sooner last year.
The lasts points was the standing joke about paying V.A.T. to which you replied not V.A.T. registered and only getting your high start up costs back went on to quote several hundred pounds for Sugar, Fondant, Nucs and obviously Queens. At this point you seemed to be getting a bit tetchy.
The rule of the adverts is non commercial really, sometimes gets blurred but to be fair not that often off the Commercial Guys that frequent the forum. The irony seems to be missed on you that your start up costs were high because you were gearing up to sell large numbers, not to keep for yourself, improve your stock or selling surplus.
Seriously - what has this got to do with you? But for clarity I'll explain. I invested in a few hives and then it quite quickly got out of control. I got carried away and split my hives way too quickly and invested way too much money. More than I could afford. I decided in order to recoup my INITIAL outlay I would aggressively split my colonies (hence the post) and forfeit any honey production. A double brood colony taken all the way through the various seasons here can easily produce 100lbs of honey in a good year, so sacrificing 5 colonies is the same as sacrificing 500lbs (at £6 a year lets call it £3k). Not far different to what I stood to earn from selling the nucs but not taking into consideration the following costs.
20 Poly Nucs - £600
20 Queens - £600
Frames, wax, sugar, fondant etc etc...
I probably made £1500 in total against the previous expenditure of around £7k. Over £5k down!
Please tell me how on earth this is a commercial operation!
Now the “endorsement” which finally pushed me to make a comment. It is very common for new people to come on here either looking for bees or in their first posts will say Have a Nuc ordered (sometimes off X), putting out a bait hive, on the swarm list, or a friend. So usually you know where their bees have come from. The user Werbo joined late last year, built swarm traps, asked what queen to buy and then came back and asked to buy a brood box for another swarm in May, which suggests his other bees were a swarm not bought .Not seen much of him at all and never mentioned bees really which is unusual. Asked about a Black Queen July and that was it until the endorsement, strange and unusual to say the least.
All of the above didnt bother me. People have their opinions and I answered their questions promptly and honestly. But why do you think you can jump to conclusion! Werbo messaged me and enquired about bees. I said I could supply a nuc and delivered a nuc to the Wirral. A 50 mile round trip for £160 bees and frames only. I also installed the nuc for him and on first inspection realised something was wrong! NO QUEEN! In my naivety I hadnt left them to settle long enough and she must have flow off when I opened the nuc. I went home and and got him another nuc and drove back to the Wirral and installed the new nuc alongside the old one (merged), made sure the queen was in situ and apologised profusely. I left the queen in a crown of thorne cage and gave him instruction to when to release her. Of course I didnt charge him a penny for the additional nuc or additional mileage. I was very much out of pocket! That was the last I heard from him except to say he has released the queen and the nuc seemed ok.
Werbo is based in an ideal spot, near plenty of forage in an allotment but right next to a good fair chunk of OSR that was in full flower. Clearly his nuc built up to a good size and he got some honey. He posted on here and I had no idea he was going to post.
He had 27 posts. The guys who endorsed you had 3 and 4 respectively, yet you have the nerve to assume its some sort of insider dealing to lure people into buying my nucs. Seriously - just grow up!
The Spring advert in 2017 was again selling “Buckfast Nucs” he had taken some orders so busily made up more plywood Nucs and was offering high teens 20 (ish) or so Nucs for sale in total iirc. £150 ish? Delivery May / June and again it was an early advert and deposits required. There were also a few holes in this advert but nobody really commented on them.
At the time he had 12 colonies according to his profile and a couple of posts on the forum. These nucs were made by splits, so here is the maths.
So if you intend to meet Late May / Early June timescales you are looking to make nucs up mid April as above. If you wanted to sell 20 Nucs you would have to make up about 30 to have a reasonable chance given the time of year. This obviously reduces the size of your present colonies significantly. You also have to make sure you have the right amount and mix of bees, brood stores and keep them in the boxes. Not an easy feat for a highly experienced / professional beekeeper let alone someone that is fairly new. Each nuc then has to raise a reasonable queen and then get it mated. Again such big splits in those numbers doesn’t bode well for final result of queens in both numbers and quality.
Plywood nucs were clearly labelled as for transport only. I had a load of plywood and no money to buy any nucs at the time.
Queens were bought in as discussed above. Why not ask the questions instead of assuming to know whats going on?
If the nucs raise the queens of decent quality and numbers you then have to get them mated, the usual practice is to ensure lots of drone brood in your apiary. The issue being if you have lots of drone brood the hives with that brood have less workers so you may struggle for worker brood for the nucs. Also the drones are the same genetics as the splits so inbreeding could be an issue. So in reality you are relying on a large number of local mature drones very early in the season from other apiaries / hives, not going to happen.
You could have saved yourself a lot of writing if you had asked where my queens were from. All imported from a fully complaint and reputable EU breeder/reseller.
So in the past 6 months you have offered nucs to the value of over £6,000 on your threads, not bad for non commercial.
Again, I have no need to justify myself to you but for sake of clarity and completeness, here goes:
Do you actually understand the difference between turnover and profit. You seem incredibly confused because you keep on talking about gross turnover!
Lets use that £6k as an example. Ive probably sold a bit of honey as well. Maybe £500's worth. Lets say £6.5k incoming since I have kept bees.
Outgoings:
30 poly nucs - £900
Honey Extractor - £500
Honey Tank - £200
30 Queen Bees - £1000
20 Full poly Hives - £2000
Frames, Foundation, Treatments - £500
Transport and diesel for moving hives and selling nucs - £200
Honey jars and Labels - £200
Original 4 colonies - £1200
Total £6.7k
If you want to class the time I have spent replying to nuc adverts, installing nucs at peoples homes, driving around in my free time, time spent tending the hives and completing splits/swarm control you can probably add another £2/3k on that but I wont for arguments sake.
So please stop grumbling on about turnover. My net profit over the past 3 years is a £200 loss. Well into commercial territory obviously.
Im not gonna even talk about your last post. You dont need to justify peoples endorsements to me. Its perfectly acceptable and I never questioned it.
You cant expect to write 1000s of words in an argument and then expect somebody not to reply. Again, I welcome any reply. We are all grown ups and can have a debate even if it does get a little heated.
Now onto the crux of the issue. WHY ARE YOU SO BOTHERED!
Why do you have an encyclopaedic memory of my selling threads.
It doesnt take a genius to work this one out does it?
You've had a tidy sideline selling nucs (how many is anybody's guess) but you talk like an experienced beekeeper so lets say a conservative 10 a year for the past 15 years. 150 nucs at £150 each. That's a very nice £22.5k you have earn't yourself.
You see on the beeforum that somebody else is selling nucs in reasonable proximity to you and you feel threatened. You feel I am going to take your business so you set about to sabotage my operation. Nice idea, not very subtle though.
Anyway, thats an hour we have each lost.
Care to call it quits???
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