prime bees.com

We love getting feral hives and swarms brought to our bee yard. Although there are varying philosophies on types of bees and breeds, we believe that a diversified bee population is our best bet to get healthy, survivor bees.

I’ve always been a fan of infographics and we stumbled upon this one that outlines common bee breeds in the US. Most of the bees we interact with on a daily basis in ours or other beekeepers yards are a mixture of these.

Most of our queens are Buckfast or Italian but because we live in Texas and there’s statistically feral hives (with drones) every mile or so, we probably have a healthy mixture of feral bee brood in there as well. We call them survivor bees or “prime bees”, because they’re out there on their own, reproducing and surviving year over year without the help of us. We love relocating swarms to our apiary and will continue to do so because we want the strongest and best performing bees in our yard.