“If you can get a wild hive swarm, these bees are
worth their weight in gold,” he tells me with passion. “These bees might have existed with zero
human intervention; they’ve bred, expanded,
swarmed and relocated many times—and they
have survived.” If you can get these bees and incorporate them into your apiary, you will have
added hardy bees that will produce and grow
successfully as a natural hive! So if they can survive on their own without human intervention
but they end up producing 5, 10, 15 lb. less of
honey than a conventional treated hive are they
worth it? Brian says emphatically, “YES!”
A further development on an earlier point, there
are 3 categories of bee out there: commercial,
hobbyist and wild. Each of these has a corresponding susceptibility to infestation or disease
like Varroa mites or nosema.
Note—even if mankind
stopped all beekeeping
operations there would
still be the wild bees out
there spreading pathogens
and parasites amongst
themselves; a fact that
commercial operations
have been dealing with for
decades.
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