Dont buy in to the package rip off- where you buy bees by weight , they dont know the queens and are NOT adapted to your area.
I buy bees that are raised 20 miles from my home. I'm pretty sure they are locally adapted.
I'm all about finding feral hives - I mean, who doesn't like free? But the last wild swarm I got didn't overwinter whereas the ripoff package hive brought in 120 lbs of honey. Unless you bait a rural area with no mainstream agriculture there's no telling what kind of bees you're getting. Some work out and some don't.
setting up bait hives to catch bees is the best and cheapest plan to get some bees
You're right that it's the cheapest way to get bees but it's not necessarily the best, especially if you live in an area with Africanized bees like I do.
To the point of the OP, the bees that Backward Beekeepers talk about are not special, they may be wild or they may have escaped from Uncle Joe's hive, but if they are surviving on their own with no inputs from Bayer or Monsanto and you find them or buy them they can do the same in your apiary.