Swarm season in Australia

Co-author: Mateo Kaiser

Catching a swarm is a great way to grow your apiary. It’s also a service to the community, removing bees from unwanted and inconvenient locations.

Mateo Kaiser runs Swarmed, a platform that connects beekeepers with members of the public. He used swarm reports to track the prevalence of swarms across Australia from June 2025 to October 2026.

A swarm leaves its hive on a warm, still day with the queen somewhere in the middle of the cluster. Across Australia, those days arrive a little later the further south you go.

• What is Swarmed?
• Swarm season moves south, a few weeks at a time
• Autumn swarms
• What this means for beekeepers
• When a neighbour calls about a swarm
  

A swarm resting on the ground beside a garden wall in Balmoral, New South Wales. Reported through Swarmed, October 2026.

What is Swarmed?

Swarmed (beeswarmed.org) connects people who find a swarm of honey bees with local beekeepers who can collect it. It’s free to use, both for swarm reporters and the beekeepers who register.

Since August 2025, Australians have sent more than 2,100 swarm reports, almost 1,000 of them since July, many through clubs affiliated with Amateur Beekeepers Australia. Each report records where and when the swarm was seen, how high it was and how big it looked, which is enough to show how the season plays out state by state.

Want advice on how to catch a swarm? See our blog with video demonstrations.

HOW TO CATCH A SWARM

Swarm season moves south, a few weeks at a time

Last season, swarm reports picked up first in Queensland, in early September. New South Wales followed in mid-September, South Australia and Western Australia in the last week of September, Victoria at the start of October and the ACT a few days after that. I counted a state's season as underway once the first tenth of its reports had come in.

Queensland was busiest in September, and New South Wales stayed busy through September and October. Everywhere else peaked in October. In Victoria and the ACT, about a quarter of last season's reports came after the third week of November, and they kept arriving into January.

This spring has been unusually warm in the south. Whether the swarms are early too is harder to tell. Far more people report through Swarmed than a year ago, so this year's reports can't yet be set against last year's.

Each line shows a state's swarm reports week by week through last season, July 2025 to April 2026. The dot marks when its season got underway, and the bar around it shows how far that date could be out.

It's a good idea to have a swarm kit at the ready for any potential swarm reports. Many beekeepers will keep one in the car. We’ve put together a swarm kit so you can be prepared.

PICK UP A SWARM KIT

Autumn swarms

New South Wales had a smaller second lift in autumn, with more than a quarter of its reports in February, March and April. Over half of those were established colonies, though, and swarms alone rose only in March. Swarmed has noticed a similar pattern in North America, where three seasons of reports show swarming carrying on into early autumn at about a third of the spring peak, mostly in the warmer south.

Autumn calls are often a different job. Across the country, about a quarter of autumn reports were bees that had been in place for a month or more, against fewer than one in ten in spring, and more of them were inside a wall or roof. Those usually mean a cut-out where the beekeeper is dealing with an established bee colony.

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A swarm resting on a flowering shrub in Wallan, Victoria. Reported through Swarmed, October 2026.

What this means for beekeepers

The start dates above double as a calendar. If you set bait hives, have them up a few weeks before your state's season gets going: by mid-August in Queensland, late August around Sydney and mid-September further south. Most reported swarms are low and fresh, so a box, a sheet and a short ladder in the car cover most calls. To get an alert when someone near you reports one, sign up as a beekeeper on Swarmed.

For trickier cases, check out our handy blog on How to catch a swarm high in a tree.

When a neighbour calls about a swarm

As a local beekeeper, you may get notified about swarms in your area. People are often afraid of bees, so a bit of reassurance goes a long way.

A swarm is a colony between homes, resting while scout bees look for somewhere to live. It is calmer than it looks, because the bees have no hive to defend. It may stay a few hours or a couple of days, so it's worth passing on a few things quickly:

• Tell them to keep a few metres back and bring children and pets inside.
• Don't spray, hose or try to move it. A sprayed swarm is a colony a beekeeper would have taken.
• Check they're honey bees. European wasps get mistaken for them, and Swarmed's guide to identifying a bee swarm shows the difference.
• If you’re not going to take the swarm, ask them to take a photo from a safe distance and report it at Swarmed, so beekeepers nearby get the alert straight away.
• If bees are flying in and out of a wall or roof, they've moved in, and that needs a removal specialist.

Swarmed connects people who find a bee swarm with local beekeepers in Australia, North America and Europe. Reporting a swarm is free at beeswarmed.org.

Mateo Kaiser is Master Beekeeper at Swarmed. To compile this information, he used swarm reports to Swarmed from Australia between August 2025 and 24 October 2026, sent in by the public and by the beekeepers who collected the swarms, leaving out test reports and suspected wasps. "Last season" means July 2025 to June 2026. Temperatures are daily averages for each state's capital city from the Open-Meteo archive.

Reports show when swarms are found, and that depends partly on how many people in each place use Swarmed, so the data is adjusted to correct for this as best as possible. Tasmania and the Northern Territory have too few reports to include yet.