It’s encouraging that so many people are getting into bees. Probably a good thing for flow. Also a good thing for the schwarmfangers, they have people to sell the schwarms to.
There will probably be a lot of schwarms around on the Sunshine Coast in the coming months.
One of the messages I took from this was the point of population density. Bees have a three to five kilometre range and too many hives in an area only creates weak hives and increases the chances of disease. Commercial bee keepers move their hives to keep them fed non commercial bee keepers leave their hives in the one location. Would you leave a dozen horses in a paddock with no feed? Why would you do the same to bees. Overpopulation actually works against the interests of Flow.
I didn’t see it like that. The message I took was that new beekeepers don’t learn swarm management techniques. That would explain the large increase in swarm numbers.
10,00 colonies sounds a lot. Are they talking about the inner city or the city & surrounding suburbs? If there were too many colonies for the available food, the colonies wouldn’t be building up to swarming strength.
I have a new beekeeper picking up a colony from me tomorrow afternoon. I wonder if he will learn swarm management techniques.
Hopefully the majority of new beekeepers will do a basic bee course before they physically get their bees. They will learn about swarm control within that course (although I don’t remember seeing/hearing much about it in my course, let alone physically do a split)
My first experience was a sudden appearance of a very large swarm (still the biggest I’ve seen) heading off to a tree at an unobtainable 30 mtrs up a gum tree. Only then I really started to learn about swarm control. But I’ve still had swarms, as JeffH can attest to, he was the recipient of one. I’d run out of boxes. and I think I was at work. (That thing that I used to get paid to do:grinning: )