I saw this question in a beekeeping group today: Is it best to buy bees locally or is there no issue shipping in from out of state? Almost everyone agrees that buying bees locally is the best option, and I agree with that as well. However, there is one commonly repeated idea that I do not share: catching swarms as a good source for your first bees. I understand why that sounds appealing, but I would not recommend relying on swarms as your main way to start beekeeping. The problem is simple. You do not know where a swarm comes from. You do not know its disease status. You do not know the varroa pressure it has been living under. You also do not know whether it came from a managed apiary nearby or from a feral colony living in a tree, a wall, or a chimney. A swarm can look “healthy” and still bring problems into your beekeeping for years. That said, I still think you should catch swarms if they show up. Leaving them can create other problems. But treat them like a risk until proven otherwise. My approach is to keep a separate, isolated quarantine apiary away from my main yards. I use a small dedicated toolbox that stays with that yard only. (I do this for all of my apiaries) Gloves, hive tools, knives, feeders, everything that touches those colonies stays there. This reduces the risk that a hidden infection or contamination gets carried back to your healthy apiaries. There are also a few practical steps you can take to reduce risk when you bring a swarm home. One example is feeding a swarm 50/50 sugar syrup. This helps ensure that any honey the swarm carried, which may contain pathogens, is used for wax production instead of being stored and later consumed. Feeding also stimulates wax production and creates an artificial nectar flow that helps the queen start laying quickly. I go deeper into this in my post here: https://www.skool.com/the-beekeeper-1771/why-i-replace-my-wax-every-year

This morning I saw a post in a beekeeping group on Facebook where a beekeeper had found a wild honey bee colony living in a tree. He asked other beekeepers in the group whether it would be possible to freeze the honey and then feed it to his other colonies. He received several replies saying yes, and some even claimed it would be a good idea. One man even stated that wild colonies are probably just as healthy as anybody’s hives. These statements could hardly be more wrong or more dangerous. We have no reliable way of knowing the health status of wild colonies. It is extremely difficult to know which viruses or bacteria may be present in a colony living in the wild. Two of the most serious examples are American foulbrood and European foulbrood. American foulbrood is caused by a spore forming bacterium, similar in that sense to anthrax. Because of this, the spores can survive for a very long time in materials such as honey and can easily infect other colonies when that honey is fed to them. It is also important to understand that strong colonies can appear healthy because they have the strength to remove diseased brood and dead bees. This can give the impression of a healthy colony, but make no mistake, such colonies will eventually collapse. In large parts of Europe there are strict biosecurity regulations regarding these bee diseases. In Sweden, all colonies infected with American foulbrood are destroyed by burning, together with all material that has been in contact with them. Contact tracing is carried out and sampling is performed at apiaries within a radius of one mile (10 km) , approximately 6.21 miles, and a restriction zone is established. This zone is only lifted once the area has been declared free from disease. Within the zone, honey may not be moved ouside the zone unless it is bottled directly into consumer packaging, and it is forbidden to move bees or sell queens from the area. Norway has even stricter legislation, where similar rules also apply to European foulbrood.