In this instructional video, Laurence Edwards explains why beekeepers should use both swarm hunting and swarm magnets, then walks through building a highly effective swarm magnet (also called a Russian scion). He starts by describing how swarms locate an intermediate stop after leaving the original hive, making that spot ideal for a magnet. Edwards first shows a ultra‑budget version made from scrap wood and plywood, then upgrades to a more durable design using a black plastic tray lid with a protective lip. He details how to make the magnet attractive by coating the wood with melted beeswax and propolis, and introduces a “turbo‑charged” method using filtered beeswax collected in a pillowcase. To prevent bees from slipping off, he adds horizontal wooden slats for clustering. Finally, he gives placement advice – head‑height, convenient for the keeper, near the apiary but not on the ground – and encourages viewers to combine this magnet with other swarm‑capture techniques. The video ends with a brief plug for a low‑cost bait hive tutorial.
Chapters
Are you a swarm hunter or a swarm magnet? In this video, I'm going to tell you why it's probably best to be both and show you how to build the best swarm magnet money can buy. In this video, I'm going to talk to you about the different methods of getting a swarm, getting it back home, and why I think it's a really good idea to spread your bets and do all 3 of those things. So this was a popular video, cheapest way to catch bees for under £2. This is a bait hive. This isn't what we're talking about today. Getting a call saying there is a swarm in a field, on a fence post, up a tree, going out and collecting it, doing some swarm hunting, that's not what we're talking about today. So you're thinking, if you're not swarm hunting and you're not attracting swarms to come and live in their forever home, why do you need a swarm magnet? And in order to answer that question, you need to understand how bees swarm. They'll exit a beehive. They'll probably have a rough idea of where their forever home is. Hopefully it's one of your bait hives. Probably going to be a rotten-out tree in the middle of nowhere. But they have an intermediate stop along the way. Sometimes that's directly outside the beehive. If your queen's got a clipped wing, it will probably be underneath the beehive. If you're really unlucky, it will be 25 meters up a tree, about 10 meters away from your beehive. But they pretty much always have this intermediate stop within maybe 10 to a couple of hundred meters away from where they originally swarmed. That is the place to put your swarm magnet. And the reason it's such a good idea to place these swarm magnets around is that it eliminates the chance, or massively reduces the chance, that your lost swarms from your beehives are going to end up high in a tree somewhere where you just can't get them. Nothing worse than going and finding a swarm, big massive prime swarm, 6, 7 pounds of bees and you just can't get to them. No chance of getting to them whatsoever. How frustrating is that? So what we're going to build today, a swarm magnet, or another name for it is a Russian scion. Now Whistle Thicket did a really good video on this. I follow his channel, I suggest you follow it as well. It's a great beekeeping channel. I've got my own little take on it though. That's what I'm going to show you today, my no-nonsense beekeeping style of how to make a Russian scion. So a Russian scion, as we said, is a swarm magnet. You're going to hang it up somewhere in your apiary, and you're going to try and get that intermediate stop of the swarm to land on your Russian scion to give you a chance of capturing it before it goes away. Is it much use to me where I spend probably half an hour a week in each apiary? Maybe not. Would it work well for me if the bees swarm in bad weather? Definitely, because then they're reluctant to move. Would it work for someone who keeps the bees in their garden, can take a look at their beehives out of the window, and they can actively see if they swarm? 100%. If that's you, you need to build one of these. It takes under 5 minutes. So there are loads of ways to build this. I'm going to give you a rough indication. Use what is around. I found some old wood in a skip, and I found some old plywood in a skip. The simplest build in the world. All you do, you take a piece of wood, You put a piece of plywood on it, you put a screw through it so it looks like that, and that is the Russian scion complete. That is the budget version, obviously. I'm going to go with a slightly better version, and I'm going to show you how to make this as attractive as it can possibly be to swarms that are leaving your beehives. So first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to get rid of my piece of ply. Ply works well, it's the cheapest way of doing it, but it's just not going to last me very long. I want to upgrade the kit a little bit. I'm going to change this top board into something I've got on hand that's a lot better suited. So here we go, black plastic tray. We use these in our honey extraction room for putting supers on so they don't drip out on the floor. So there we go, I've upgraded the lid of my Russian Scion. 2 reasons I've upgraded that lid. First one is the plastic's going to be so much more durable, means that I'm not going to be constantly changing out that plywood roof each year. And the second one is I really like this lip round the edge. I think the bees are going to appreciate that lip as well. Means that it keeps the rain out, means that they're likely to cluster up under here for a lot longer than if you didn't have that lip round the edge. Now I said that's complete. I think that will be a swarm magnet, but why not make it as attractive as you can possibly make it? And the way that you're going to do that is you're going to coat all of this wood here with beeswax, melted beeswax. Rub it down, get as much beeswax as you can possibly get on there. Rub propolis on there as well. You want to make it smell like a beehive. We know it works, works in the bait hives, it'll work in the Russian scion as well. So you just want to melt down the beeswax, cover that piece of wood in it there. That's going to be really attractive to the bees. Another way of doing it, and this is a turbocharged way of doing it, is when you're filtering your beeswax. If you want to see the video, I'll stick a link up there, how to filter beeswax with a bucket, some heat, and a pillowcase. You end up with these pillowcases here. Gregory Pat, you're getting a shout out here because you gave me the idea to use these for swarm trapping, making it into a swarm magnet. All you need to do then: invert that round, stick a few screws in it so it's not going to go flying off, and there we go. It's nearly complete, but we're not finished yet. The Russian science that I've seen, you would be finished at this point. But what I'm not too keen on on the design. is that it's a little bit slippery everywhere. Little bit slippy here regardless of whether you use plastic or wood, but on this vertical surface here, it's a little bit slippy as well. Using the pillowcase method definitely mitigates that, but if you're not gonna use the pillowcase method, I think it's a good idea just to tack on a couple of horizontal bits of wood there to give the bees somewhere to cluster around, to give them that strength that they're not gonna fall down. So just take any bits of wood that you can get, break 'em in half, And then you're just going to screw them on horizontally. And there we go, that is the No Nonsense Beekeeping Russian scion complete. But now I'm going to answer the question, where is best to put it? And it's quite simple really, put it somewhere that's convenient for you. Don't put it on the floor, don't put it 5 meters up in a tree, put it somewhere like that, head height, where if you get a nice cluster of bees around it, you can just drop them off, tap them off into a box, Put it somewhere that makes sense. I'm going to go and hang this up now and I'll show you where it is. And there she is. You can see just behind the beehives here, attached to a tree at a really convenient height for me. I'll update you as soon as I catch anything in there. If I was a swarm, that's definitely where I'd like to hang out for a few hours. Right. So you've set your swarm magnet up. You want to see how to set up a bait hive for £2? Check out this video here.
