In this episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping, Laurence Edwards of Black Mountain Honey demonstrates how a swarm was captured in a set of spare stacked boxes that he keeps at the Orchard Apiary as a convenient stock of supers. After receiving a tip that his hives might be swarming, he inspects the apiary, confirms the swarm is not from his own marked queens, and discovers an unmarked queen in the captured swarm. He marks the queen, explains why leaving an entrance and a roof on the stored boxes makes them ideal bait hives, and outlines his plan to let the swarm establish before relocating the boxes. Edwards advises beekeepers to use their spare boxes as swarm traps, highlighting the benefits for both their own and wild bees, and presents this as a low‑effort, high‑reward swarm mitigation strategy. The video ends with a call to subscribe.
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Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Today we're in the Orchard Apiary. I'm just doing my weekly inspections. I had a call earlier from someone saying they think that my hives might be swarming. I've been through every single hive and I knew there was going to be a risk of the bees swarming around this stage of the year. Um, I left it a little bit late on the inspections, but it's not my hive that swarmed. So I've, uh, I've looked around the apiary. He said he saw some activity around my bundle of boxes that I use. I always leave a good bundle of boxes at each apiary, um, just with a bit of plywood over them, off the floor, just to kind of, uh, just so I don't have to keep the van loaded full of supers. It makes coming to the apiary so much easier if you keep stock of them there. But that added benefit this time of the year, if you put a nice roof on top of it, it's the perfect bait hive. Um, you see it left, right, and center. All beekeepers get this. They don't go into the bait hives, although sometimes they do. They go into your stack of supers or your unused hives. So I'm going to look in here today. I'm pretty certain though, from the activity outside the front, that we're going to have caught a swarm in here. So like I say, my first Uh, guess when I got here was it's definitely going to be one of mine. The fact that I've got a visual from someone saying, I think your hives are swarming, um, and they're going to be in these boxes here, led me to believe like it's 99% certain it's mine. But I've gone through it, I found the queen, she's not marked. I've gone through every single one of my hives, found the queen who is marked, um, so it's definitely not one of my swarms. So again, I've got some free bees. So I just thought I'd let you know and show you this, show you the swarm that I've caught. So whenever I'm stacking up these boxes, I always leave them— instead of leaving them like that where there's no entrance, I'll leave them like that so there's an entrance so they can get in. Not always much, make sure there's a roof on them. And this is nice drawn horrible comb, like, so it's, it's really, really tempting for bees. And you can see straight away, really nice swarm covering like 6 or 7 frames. Uh, it was covering 2 or 3 frames on the top box as well, um, and it's covering, you know what I mean, pretty much 2/3 of that second box, and then one box down it's covering as well. So there you go, plenty of bees. So I've gone through this already. I found the queen. She wasn't marked, she wasn't one of mine. I've marked her now. I'm not going to go through all of these because they've only just got here today. I don't want to annoy them, I don't want them to abscond. So all I'm going to do is I'm just going to leave them there. I don't need these boxes for the time being. They can set up home and then I'll move them at a convenient time. So that's it for today's video. Super quick video, just want to let you know if you have Alte Paris and and you keep your boxes at your out apiaries, why not turn them into a swarm trap at the same time as you store them? I mean, the boxes don't degrade, you're keeping them dry, you're keeping them off the ground, but you might as well try and catch some free bees while you're there. I would say 9 times out of 10, you're going to catch your own bees in that, which is a good swarm mitigation strategy. Like, it's better for them to fly off into your boxes than fly off kind of over the horizon. Mm-hmm. But even better when it's kind of someone else's bees or, you know, some wild bees that have flown to your colony and decided choose that as a place for them to live. So I'll leave them there, I'll probably let them kind of have a brood cycle there, and then I'll move them in 2 or 3 weeks. So that's it for today's video, hope you've enjoyed it. Please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video. I'll see you next time.
