Laurence Edwards warns beginners against buying swarms of bees. Purchased swarms often carry diseases and high varroa loads, and you can't verify the queen's health. Instead, catch wild swarms yourself, use bait hives, or buy proven colonies that survived at least 12 months of care.
In this video, I'm going to talk about buying swarms of bees. Hi, I'm Lawrence Ederson, Black Mans in Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. This might seem like a really strange topic of conversation. What we're going to talk about today though is buying swarms of bees. Now the first thing to say, the first thing to explain is what a swarm of bees So obviously when a colony looks to reproduce, they send out a queen. That's called a swarm of bees. They cluster up in a tree and they're trying to make a new colony of bees. People sometimes use the term incorrectly, and I think this is where some beginners do fall into the trap of buying swarms of bees. So I'll get it out there straight from the beginning, you should not buy swarms of bees for a number of reasons. I'm going to cover them all in this video. The main one is it's really, really cheap just to go out and catch your own swarms. The second one is if you don't want to go out and catch them, you can set up bait hives and have them come to you. The third one though, and the most important one, is swarms can carry a lot of undesirable traits and they can carry a lot of undesirable diseases as well. So I just wanted to do this video to talk about this whole practice of selling Swarms. I see it a lot on Facebook. I see it in the US, I see it in the UK, and it's just something that I think is really, really bad. So if you're going out to go and catch swarms, what you should be doing all the time is taking that swarm, putting it onto clean equipment, monitoring the swarm, seeing if it's got a queen in there, seeing if the queen is correctly mated, monitoring them for disease. You might have a really horrible queen in there. They might need to be requeened, almost certainly going to have a really high varroa load. Now, what I'm talking about here is not if you're going to go and catch a swarm and you're going to love for them and care for them for 12 months, do everything you need to get them through the winter, prove that they're a real colony, and then maybe sell those on, or you're going to use that as a split and turn that into numerous nucs and you're going to put queens of known origin in there. That's a very, very different argument. And I know a lot of beekeepers do that. I've got no issue with that whatsoever. But what I see on Facebook and on Marketplace is people going out, collecting a swarm of bees, and then posting it 2 hours later saying, I've got a swarm of bees for sale and it's X amount. I fundamentally disagree with that. I don't think people should be doing it. And the reason that I'm putting this video on here is to warn beginners, to say to them, you shouldn't be buying swarms. Now everyone's going to think that I've got an agenda here because I'm trying to sell you nucs. Not at all. If you want to get yourself a swarm, go and catch yourself a swarm. Catching swarms is so much fun. Or build yourself a bait hive, make it really attractive to bees, and get the bees to come to you. Both of those methods are free, and I really recommend both of those methods as well. So I do appreciate not everyone is going to be able to afford to get a nucleus colony, and I don't see that to being a barrier to keeping bees. What I really, really don't like is seeing beginners ripped off because I do feel they're being ripped off here by going out and buying a swarm that someone else has just been out to collect. Because the person that's selling you that swarm doesn't know the nature of the bees, doesn't know that there's a mated queen in there, doesn't know if there's any disease risk with that colony, and they're selling it to you for quite a reasonable amount of money from what I've seen on Facebook and Marketplace. So back to the original question, should you buy swarms of bees? No, I definitely don't think you should. And also, should you sell swarms of bees? No, I definitely don't think you should. If you want to get a swarm of bees and you want to build it up and you want to make sure that it's a healthy colony with a mated queen that's disease-free with a low varroa count, and you've proven that it's gone through the winter as well, then obviously that's a completely different proposal, and I personally don't have any issues with that. But I really don't like to see people being ripped off getting these swarms where the origin of them is not known, The disease risk and the varroa load and the queen mating viability isn't known. I just hate to see people being ripped off. So I hope you enjoyed that video. I hope you found it useful. Don't go buying any swarms. As always, please hit the subscribe button. Please hit the bell so you're notified of every video. And I'll see you next time.
