I'm SORRY - I Gave You Such BAD Advice

I have given you some terrible, terrible advice over the years. In this video, I want to retract that advice and I want to fix the guidance that I give to new beekeepers. So the advice that I used to give was, if you want to catch swarms, if you want the cheapest way to get into beekeeping, put dark black comb into a bait box, any material, 40 liters big, in a certain position, and you will catch yourself a swarm. The reason it was such bad advice wasn't because it doesn't work, It was because it's an incredibly easy way to spread disease across apiaries and across regions. So in particular here, we're talking about EFB and AFB, American foulbrood and European foulbrood. Now you might not know that you've got European foulbrood, and I'd be a little bit disappointed if you had American foulbrood and you didn't know about it, because it is pretty horrific. However, if you've got frames, dark frames, and and you're putting them up to try and catch swarms, all you're doing is spreading disease as far as it can possibly go. You might be attracting a perfectly healthy swarm into your bait hive and then infecting it with your infected frames. Or even worse than that, you might be kind of attracting bees, scout bees, into that bait hive. They go in, have a little sniff around, maybe there's some remnants of honey in there. They take those remnants of honey back to their colony. You're not just infecting one swarm of bees, you're infecting multiple colonies within that area. So I would like to formally retract that advice and that guidance. I do not do it, I condone that behavior, and I do not think anybody should be putting dark combs into bait hives to attract swarms. Swarms are plentiful, there will always be thousands and thousands of swarms for people to go out and get each year, and what I'm going to tell you in this video is just an easy way to kind of replicate that scent and that smell and try and catch swarms without the disease risk. So I'm not just talking about diseased frames there or dark frames. I'm talking about all secondhand beekeeping equipment. Anything that's been used with bees can either contain bacteria for European foulbrood or spores for American foulbrood. So anything that has ever touched bees and hasn't been cleaned and sterilized cannot be used to catch swarms. So personally, I would advise you to not catch swarms at all. Full stop. Don't catch swarms. Them, don't take them into your apiary, just completely ignore them and do not catch them. That's what I do, but it's not realistic to think that everybody's going to do that, and I know that some people who go out and catch swarms, like, it's a really good service that they provide because not everybody wants a swarm in their garden. So I know that the practice of catching swarms is going to continue, but I'd like to kind of try and help facilitate some healthy guidelines, some safe guidelines for going out and catching swarms. And just trying to reduce that risk down as much as possible. So first off, if you are intent on catching swarms in bait hives, what I would suggest is trying to make some new bait hives out of like scrap wood that's never been touched by bees. You can do it with pallet wood, you can do it with kind of OSB, you can do it with plywood. They might not last forever, but they'll last a couple of seasons. And the design of these just couldn't be any simpler. You want a 40-liter box in the shape of a rectangle And you want to have it in a vertical fashion. You can cut yourself like a single hole, maybe like a 50p hole, inch and a half hole somewhere at the base, and then at the top you can hang yourself some brand new frames with foundation in, or some brand new frames with some foundation starter strips in. Swarms are incredible at drawing out comb. Try and make use of that and get the bees to draw out some foundation or some starter strips. Now you want to place that anywhere above the ground, anything from like a meter upwards. Woods. I like to place them quite high, like 3 or 4 meters up, but anything above a meter from the ground is really good. And you want to face it due south if you're in the Northern Hemisphere and then due north if you're in the Southern Hemisphere. Now what you can do to further entice the bees into that is you can take some melted clean beeswax and you can paint the inside with beeswax. That helps to make it feel like it's a used beehive for the swarms that are coming in. And you can add a couple of drops of lemongrass oil into that wax if you want, But I find a better way of using the lemongrass oil is every kind of week or so, taking a dab of lemongrass oil, putting it on some kitchen paper, putting it on like a zipped up baggie, and just pinning that to the inside wall of the swarm trap. The lemongrass oil mimics that queen's pheromone, and it is proven to be a really good lure for catching swarms. So there's loads of other good guidance out there in terms of how you can go out and catch a swarm and how you should set up your bait hives. If you know of any secret little tricks, obviously stick them in the comments. I'm always keen to learn about new ways to attract swarms. But the next part of this video is what to do once you've caught your swarm. Now, the first thing you're not going to do is go and take it into your normal apiary. You do need to have a quarantine apiary, ideally in the middle of nowhere, not near anybody else's bees, but as far as practically possible. And then what I would suggest is an absolute minimum of 2 cycles of brood, preferably 3 cycles of brood. And you want to go in there, and each time there's a new cycle of brood, go in there and do a Full disease inspection. And what I mean by disease inspection is don't just pick up the bees on the frames, shake the bees off the frames violently, get them all to go back into the box, and then look into every single cell. And what you're looking for, particularly for EFB, you're looking for those sunken twisted larvae. I would suggest at that point also getting the NBU in and see if they want to do an inspection. You can notify them via BeeBase. That definitely is best practice. But if you're confident in identifying those diseases yourself, after 3 brood cycles, you can safely take them back into your apiary. That is my guidance going forward. I definitely don't recommend using used beehives. I don't recommend using dark combs, and I recommend keeping all swarms in an isolated apiary for at least 3 brood cycles and give the NBU a chance to inspect them before you take them back into your normal apiary. I'm sorry for giving such bad advice. I'll always hold my hands up and retract it when necessary, and in this instance, this video is long overdue.