Laurence Edwards explains why buying bee colonies in August or September is risky: they'll likely fail over winter, and fixing a failed colony later is much harder than starting right. Overwintered nucs that arrive early in the season do better, expanding dramatically by mid-summer if you manage swarms carefully.
He says, in Australia, past the summer equinox, should I still get bees? Oh, this is a really good question. We see this a lot and people are always surprised with the answer, and the answer really is no. It's a bad time of the year to get bees. Beekeeping, especially in the UK, it's a lot of investment, there's a lot of money that goes into it, and the last thing I'd ever want to do to someone is to sell them a nuc in August or September and say, yeah, yeah, it's fine, just do this and the bees will be fine. There's a huge amount of risk that you take over winter, and then resetting it from a point of failure is so much more difficult than just succeeding in the first place at the right point in the year. But then what I would say is, conversely, is don't, don't put yourself down for the first nucs of the season. Don't get the first weak nucs of the season. I say like the, the first availability of nucs for the season because they are really challenging to manage in comparison to a summer nuc, and I'll explain why once I finish my coffee. So the overwintered nucs, when you get them early on in the season, we've had some pictures back from people where we send them a 6-frame nuc middle of April and they come back to us middle of August and they say, look at that colony, it's now on double brood and there's 8 supers full and I took a split out. And whilst that is brilliant and I really do like that, I think if we, if we're sending them out to beginners like that, it needs to come with the warning, which is like, you have to manage the swarm,
