Pros and Cons of Brexit Beekeeping

In this video, I'm going to tell you about the Brexit beekeeping pros and cons and how it's impacted us as a business. So hands up, are you a massive fan of Brexit or do you think it's a big, big mistake? Stick it down in the comments. I'll be interested to see what the split is like for beekeepers. I'll come straight out and say it, I was against Brexit from the beginning and I've always wanted to remain within the EU. I'm not saying that to be controversial, just being upfront and honest. And you can probably get from this video the slam that I'm gonna take on it. I'm gonna break it down for beekeeping though. I'm gonna give you all of the cons of Brexit, and I'm gonna give you all of the pros of Brexit. And what's really interesting on this take is that some of the pros and some of the cons straddle the same subject, and then depending on which camp you're in, it's either a pro or a con. So I fully appreciate this isn't a clear-cut definitive guide for beekeepers within the UK and outside of the UK. This is just my take on the impact that Brexit is having on us as a beekeeping business. Right, I'll start off with the cons then. And the number one con for us is that you can no longer import packages of bees. We did that for a couple of years. It really helped us out, meant that we were able to bring packages of bees in from the European Union. It was straightforward. Murray McGregor used to go out there, drive up the M6, stop off to about 100 different beekeepers on the way, 4 o'clock in the morning at a service station, and you can get an unlimited supply of packages of bees. The second we left the EU, they stopped that immediately. So that was something clearly that the UK government wasn't a fan of. So as soon as they were given the option to be able to eliminate that out of the equation, they did. You can no longer import packages into the UK from anywhere within the world, and for me, that is definitely a con. However, I'm not being stupid about it. I see that definitely as a pro as well, and we'll cover that later on in this video. You can dig a little bit deeper into that whole restriction on importing livestock as well. Because on day one, the ban on packages came into effect, and for the time being, you can still import queens. However, the procedures have completely changed. I used to be able to order queens from all over the EU. They'd send them over to me UPS. They'd leave whatever country it was in the EU at say midday on a Thursday, and Friday morning they'd be at my door with the postman, with the UPS driver, and that would be it. And that is all that was required in order to get your bees into the UK. Things changed pretty much overnight on this front as well. So now you have to register through the bypass system. For every single queen that comes over here, you need to take that queen out, put that in a new cage, put attendants in there, the MBU come and inspect it before you do that. Then you've got to send the cages and the attendants off to the MBU for final inspections. It is so difficult to import queens now, really, really difficult. And again, that is a huge con for us and probably a pro for other people. My concern, and I do think this is coming, is that they are going to eliminate the importation of queens into the UK. I see that is the direction in which we are heading. Personally, I really hope that doesn't happen. On the packages front, I can take that. I definitely see the positive side of not importing packages. You really are reducing the spread of diseases and pathogens and viruses. And most importantly, the big one for me is small hive beetle. We definitely don't want small hive beetle to get in. So I see that eliminating the packages coming into the UK, you really do reduce that risk. However, if they go on a full ban of queens, then I just see that the genetics going downhill in a very, very rapid fashion. That's not to say we don't have good quality genetics in this country, and I think a potential byproduct of us banning the imports of queens means that we will get a lot better at that as a country, and people will use the stocks that are over here and start doing more work on them, start breeding them. But it's a long time. You don't do that kind of thing overnight. It will take a good few years, probably over 10 years, to get to a point where you've got really good stocks that you can manage without the importation from other countries that are so far ahead of us. So there we go, first 2 really big massive impacts for us as a business. One that's already happened and we're feeling the impact, one that is potentially going to happen and I can't see it not happening in the immediate future. The next thing I want to talk about is price increases, and it would definitely be a bit unfair of me to say that the price increases that we're experiencing over the last 2 or 3 years are as a result of Brexit. It's not as straightforward as that. Everywhere in the world is seeing price increases as a result of massive inflation that's going on, but I do think that Brexit is increasing that a little bit more in the UK. And I just get the feeling that some European suppliers are maybe trying their luck a little bit with some of the prices. I know it is getting so expensive to get anything out of the EU at the moment. It's offset slightly by one of the pros that I'll discuss in a little bit, which is the strengthening pound But even then, all we're seeing at the moment is price rises going skywards, and I'd attribute a little bit of that to Brexit. The bigger problem that I'm seeing now though is reduced availability of equipment coming into the UK. Previously, you could get whatever you wanted if it was available within the EU. You just ordered it on the website, they'd ship it over, it would cost a little bit more to get the shipping coming in, and that was it. It would just arrive. There was no additional customs, import, VAT, Everything was so, so simple. The reduced availability comes in where the suppliers and the manufacturers in Europe just don't want to deal with the UK anymore. I see this at my place of work. I see it in beekeeping as well. It's just too much of a hassle for them. We're one small country out of 27, now 26 countries, and we have to have a completely different worldwide system in order for them to trade with us, whereas they still got the other 26 countries to trade with. So a lot of those companies immediately just pulled the plug on the UK and said, right, we're not trading with you anymore. Some of them are moving forward now. Some of them are realizing the UK is a good country that you need to be trading with because we buy a lot of stuff. But for some of the smaller companies, it's just a bit too difficult, which means that you end up with less competition, less availability. And I think that's helping to contribute to price increases as well. This one here isn't directly impacting us at the moment. But our plan for the business was always to grow, to expand it up to a point, and then to bring people in to help us work the bees and to help us work in what is a very seasonal business. April to October, we're very busy. October to March is a lot quieter. So having access to go into the EU and to get people to come over here to do this seasonal work and to have this massive pool of really experienced beekeeping countries— you look at the likes of Poland and France and Spain, they're all excellent beekeeping countries and they're happy to come to the UK and do this seasonal work. And now that supply line has been completely turned off, and it's worldwide visa-driven, and you need to make the case for bringing people over for these short-term visas. For us, we're not in a situation where we're going to take advantage of that yet, but it's a little bit frustrating that it was so easy before and now it's become so difficult. Speaking to big bee farmers as well who do actually employ a lot of people or had European people in place, there was a lot of disruption the UK government did not make it easy to keep people in there, and they're continuing to experience this frustration. So one of the ones that really does annoy me is that on the bus, you know, £350 million a week, that whole pantomime of everything's going to be easier, we're taking back control, we're going to do it our way, was great talk, wasn't it? And I really wish they'd actually done a lot of that stuff, but all they seem to have done is said, right, these policies and these procedures that used to apply in the EU, they're They're no longer relevant, so we're just going to draft some exactly the same ones that are based on the UK now, and we'll just change a couple of bits, and it's going to make it a lot more difficult for you. That's what we've experienced. There's been no real Brexit benefit when it comes to any of the policies or the procedures or the legislation that apply to beekeepers. The ones that have come in just make it more confusing, more difficult, more systems to go through. I've seen no Brexit benefit from changes in legislation at all. But don't worry about that, we're going to do free trade deals across the world that are going benefit UK farming. Oh, by the way, we're also going to do a free trade deal with New Zealand that completely ruins the farming industry over here for lambs and means that New Zealand honey can import tariff-free honey into the already overinflated honey market in the UK. Don't tell them that. That definitely won't go down well. This is the problem I have with it. It all sounds good when you get the jargon and the propaganda coming out of the government. But in reality, that New Zealand free trade deal is not good for the UK farming industry. They're going to flood the UK market with cheap lamb, and they're going to flood the UK market with cheaper honey than we can supply. How does that help British beekeepers? It doesn't. Right, you might sense a little bit of frustration, so let's quickly move on to some of the pros. Because there are some pros in terms of beekeeping when it comes to Brexit. So we've spoken the cons about not being able to import packages. That was a big blow for a lot of nucleus colony producers and a lot of queen producers. What these people used to do was import these packages early in the season. They'd make up nucs to replace all of the ones that they'd sold as overwintered nucs, which demand a premium price. They'd build them up throughout the season. They'd make further splits. They'd import queens. They'd break them out, overwinter those colonies, and then they'd sell them the next year as overwintered nucs at the premium price again. And then you just kind of rinse and repeat. It's a really good system and it works very, very well. And there's nothing wrong with it at all. That's just the system that people used. Once they broke that and they took out the ability for them to go and get these packages from the EU. It meant that the production of these overwintered nucs became quite a lot more difficult, and it meant that they had to sacrifice honey production from their production colonies in order to make up the splits to get them to a point where they can sell sufficient overwintered nucs. The impact that had was that there were less nucs available on the market, and then the subsequent impact of that is that the price of overwintered nucs went up, and it continues to go up. The demand outstrips supply, and the fact that they've stemmed this supply route from the EU for packages has meant that the demand has remained very, very strong. So for a beekeeping company like me that sells quite a lot of nucs, it's meant that I've been able to expand that side of the business and put more nucs into winter knowing that I'm going to be able to sell them at a premium price in April and May when the demand is high. Without a shadow of a doubt, that's definitely one bonus of Brexit. Now the same applies here for homegrown queens. So queens that are mated within the UK. And that's only going to get more severe if they do ban the import of queens, which in my personal opinion, I do think it's coming. It's only a matter of time. But Brexit sold this propaganda dream that British is best and we could do everything in our country. And then couple that with the movement for people who don't want to import queens anyway, and they want to protect the local native stocks that we've got here, it's really pushed and driven the demand for UK homegrown queens. And again, it's something that we supply. It's something that you can put a premium on the product, and it's something that is a lot harder than just importing queens from the EU and sending them out. But it's good. The demand is there. The demand's getting stronger, and I think going forward, the demand for UK mated queens is only going one way. We spoke a lot in the con section about the reduced availability of equipment and the fact that prices are going through the roof. A Brexit benefit, and I really do attribute this. Solely down to Brexit is the fact that the pound is considerably stronger than the euro. It's taken a little bit of a dip at the moment, but it was hovering around €1.10 to the pound when we left the European Union, and now it's hovering around €1.20. So you're talking in the region of, say, 10% increase in the strength of the pound, with a little bit of variance there, say plus or minus 1 or 2%. That's definitely helped offset the fact that the equipment prices are going up And that's driven by worldwide inflation. I dread to think what would have happened if it had gone the other way. We would not be affording anything that was made within the EU. So again, I said a lot of these pros and cons can kind of straddle both sides here. So in the con section, we spoke about the fact that you can't tap the seasonal pool of workers that comes from the EU. What we can do now that we've got Brexit is we can tap the worldwide resource for seasonal workers. It opens up some opportunities, but it brings with it separate challenges of bringing them in the different visa systems that I don't think anyone's really got their head around yet. I certainly haven't because I've not been looking at them in a great amount of detail. But I would say that is a pro from Brexit. You open up the resource channels for different areas around the globe, specifically India, in which I know they've got a huge beekeeping community. And I know that the UK government are looking at some form of trade deal with India in order to allow access between the 2 countries. That will benefit us, and that will bring with it a real wealth of beekeeping expertise if that does go ahead. And again, we spoke in the cons section about not being able to import queens from the EU, but we are still able to import queens from the EU. It just means that we have to go through the worldwide system for importing. It's a lot more paperwork, it's a lot more difficult, but it does bring with it a very specific big Brexit bonus, and that is we signed a free trade deal with New Zealand. Remember, that was one of the cons as well, and it means that there's potentially an avenue to get hold of New Zealand-reared queens. Very, very early on in the season. New Zealand has a very similar climate to the UK. We're pretty much at opposite sides of the globe, and with modern shipping, you can get it over here within 24 hours. So I think that's going to be a big growth avenue for some of the queen suppliers going forward. If they can agree some way of getting queens over from New Zealand, it shouldn't be any more difficult bringing queens in from New Zealand as to say bringing queens in from Italy or Spain or anywhere within the EU. So are you a fan of Brexit, or do you wish that we still remained in the European Union? Are you seeing some of those impacts? Have I missed out anything key that's impacting your beekeeping business? Stick it in the comment, I'd love to have a chat about it. If you're not interested in Brexit and talking about politics, check out this video here of an absolute monster haul of honey from one of our biggest colonies of the season.