BIBBA as an organisation is not in a position to supply members with appropriate breeding material. BIBBA encourages members to work with other local beekeepers to select and improve the quality of bees in their area by using the best local material available.
It is not advisable to source queens from a different environment from the one they have been acclimatised to. Many experienced beekeepers believe this is why colonies headed by imported queens often do not perform well in our conditions. A simple example is that bees in a heather district need to build up slower than those in an OSR area. They may adapt quite quickly, but there is often initial disappointment.
A little patience is advised if native or near native bees are sourced from outside your own area, but even then there are some parts where conditions are vastly different even only 10-15 miles away.
We do, however, hope that breeding groups will cooperate together and swap genetic material where approppriate. Some breeding groups provide queens to neighbouring beekeepers in order to improve the background population in the areas where they work and often further afield.
We need all the members we can to work together to achieve our aims of improving the quality of bees in this country and in reducing the damaging levels of imports of queens of foreign sub-species.