IMO he's had 4 years to prepare, and there has been plenty of advertising. If he is blocked from importing, then tough. Suck it up and move on. He should learn how to commercially breed himself.
That's really harsh..... and missing the point too.
I can talk from neutrality on it as I have a foot in both camps...either way it goes I will be fine...but there has not been four years to prepare. (We import..mostly for others..and also home raise around 2000 queens....not counting the hive raised ones in the main unit... and 1200 nucleii per season. However they are not the same market and the idea you can fill the UK market from UK production is largely a myth that does not quite grasp the issues. If it was a REAL opportunity it would be being done by someone long ago.)
As recently as September last year the prospect was that imports of packages would still be ok.....and despite your opinion..there are a plethora of reasons they are required apart from bad or uninformed or backward beekeeping. Don't drink the bathwater of those who say they MUST be local bees...that is a half and half bit of info as there are LOTS of good bees for your area out there that were not raised there, and some people...who tend to have their methods blanked as as an inconvenient fact...place UK queens with the breeders out there to take adavntage of the early seasons and still provide a very nice UK suited bee. Painting imported bees from Italy as nothing more than ill adapted Ligustica...as seems to be fashionable on certain fora...is utterly false. These bees..even Patricks...are raised for a northern market..mainly Germany..so selling plain old ligustica as is is often stated by the wilfully ill informed (they dont want to know) would not win a customer base.
We are on a hiatus year due to taking the current rules at face value...but our guys now work only with VSH Buckfast stock with its roots in Germany Finland Poland, and the UK. They also have OUR breeder queens from Scotland over there. The prevailing info is that this WILL be sorted out but possibly not this season, so all bar one of the legal importers are doing the same as us. Bee Equipment, on the other hand, are taking a stand on the matter and they have a right to do so. I happen not to agree with him but its a big world and takes all sorts..sometimes these guys prepared to be outliers are the triggers of change.
The Christmas Eve agreement was actually anything but..it is really another kick the can down the road deal..hence the law of unintended consequences kicking in since 1st Jan. No bee deal was made so all we have is EU law rolled over into UK law, for a deal to be done at a later date..and the bees are not in any way a high priority item...economically too insignificant to be top of the negotiating queue. Important to us...yes..but in the grand scheme of trade deals we are merely a footnote.
The govt promised that there will be no barriers to trade that were not there before....always plainly
untrue as customs and taxation at the borders (both ways) could never be anything other than a new barrier. . So..on the assumption that they were telling at least a grain of truth, it is probable that..some time over the next year.....they will fix the anomaly that mutual labelling of eachother as 'third countries' has had on a wide spectrum of agricultural and especially livestock ,trade. Bees will be a couple of paragraphs somewhere in the detail of that.
So..the realisation that imports would be likely to stop only was confirmed in the autumn....but was only really confirmed early in January. Nether date allowed preparation for a stop to trade in time for spring 2021. There are going to be a lot of disappointed beekeepers out there. There already are. If they need mid April bees then Bee Equipment are your only hope for stock with a health certificate.
Demand for these bees is strong across almost all sectors...also an inconvenient fact. Many amateurs like them too.
