Producing nucleus colonies ("nucs") to sell looks simple on paper — split a strong hive, add a queen, wait a few weeks, take the money. In practice a meaningful share of nucs fail before they ever reach a buyer: queens fail to mate, get lost on their mating flight, or the fledgling colony absconds or dies out. Every failed nuc still cost you a queen, woodware, frames and labour — it just never produced any revenue. A price that looks profitable on a "successful nuc" basis can be a loss once that failure rate is spread across the whole batch.
Many small-scale UK nuc sellers price only against their successful colonies and forget to load the cost of the ones that don't make it — a failure rate of even 15% can erase most of the margin on a modestly priced nuc.
A batch of nucleus colonies laid out in 3D, coloured by outcome, next to a live bar chart of cost, price and profit that responds as you adjust queen cost, materials and labour, failure rate, and sale price.
Failed nucs still cost a queen, woodware and labour but earn nothing — so batch profit depends on spreading full cost across every nuc produced, not just the ones that sell.
Adjust batch size, queen cost, materials + labour, failure rate and sale price. Watch boxes flip to red (failed) or amber (thin margin), and the profit bar swing green or red.
Break-even price rises fast with failure rate: going from 5% to 20% failures can push the price needed just to cover costs up by nearly a fifth.