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APEX Enterprises Catalogue Snippets

	This is what a typical front page of our catalogue looked like. Each year was signified by colouration of the front page itself in the same colour as would be valid for queen marking in that particular year. This page will not reproduce an entire catalogue as it is no longer valid. The business went bankrupt in July 1995 and is never likely to be resurrected (although I do retain title to the APEX Enterprises brand name). Short extracts from various years catalogues will be published here as a reference source to some of the other pages. In most cases the pricing information will be left out as it is not relevant to the present day. Apart from some early examples that were only four or eight pages, there were usually sixteen pages of very close spaced type. I will reproduce one complete page in its entirety to indicate the breadth of range and the attention to detail.

This is what a typical front page of our catalogue looked like. Each year was signified by colouration of the front page itself in the same colour as would be valid for queen marking in that particular year.

This page will not reproduce an entire catalogue as it is no longer valid. The business went bankrupt in July 1995 and is never likely to be resurrected (although I do retain title to the APEX Enterprises brand name). Short extracts from various years catalogues will be published here as a reference source to some of the other pages. In most cases the pricing information will be left out as it is not relevant to the present day.

Apart from some early examples that were only four or eight pages, there were usually sixteen pages of very close spaced type. I will reproduce one complete page in its entirety to indicate the breadth of range and the attention to detail.

The catalogue pages were produced by photocopying and between 1984 and 1995 we wore out four high volume photocopiers producing an unknown, but staggering, number of double sided sheets. The master copies for each page were produced using two Amstrad PCW computers that were hard-wired together and had every bang and whistle imaginable added to them. The data was held in a database that had a separate "card" for every component of every kit. Each kit also had it's own data card which extracted it's data from these component data cards. Finally the complete page was produced by "mailmerging" the card data into structured templates.

The catalogue was not sophisticated or coloured and there were only a handful of illustrations. It did however give beekeepers a choice of quality and type. For instance the pricing headings reproduced below are from the page dealing with National Hive Parts:-

CEDAR	CEDAR	PINE	PINE	PLY &	2nds	2nds
MADE	IN	MADE	IN	PINE	MADE	IN
UP	FLAT	UP	FLAT	M/U	UP	FLAT

In 1988 there were eleven different types of National stand offered in these categories and fourteen types of National floor (and none of them was "Open Mesh"!).

					Written... April 2000, Revised... 02 October 2001, New Domain... 23 October 2003, Upgraded... 20 August 2004,

APEX Enterprises Catalogue Snippets

Written... April 2000, Revised... 02 October 2001, New Domain... 23 October 2003, Upgraded... 20 August 2004,