Recommended Ways to Obtain Honey Bees
Packages
- Typically 3lbs of bees (~9000 bees)
- Mated queen can be included
- Shake bees onto your equipment
Nucs
- Usually 3 or 5 frames of bees
- Mated, laying queen included
- Usually build up faster than packages
Splits
- Split a strong colony into multiple
- Let them re-queen naturally, add queen cells, or introduce a queen
Swarms
- Make sure to get the queen
- Beware of possible Africanized bees
Gifts/Buying Used
- Always inspect everything!
- There are lots of problems you can’t see
- Scrape old wax, bleach equipment