I move bees 30- 50 feet in a single go fairly frequently.  My bees winter all pushed together in a line on a single winter stand, then they get separated for the summer.

We strap the stack together with a couple of ratchet straps, and hoist them using a chain and hook hanging from the bucket of our tractor and move 'em to where I want them to be.  I often turn them around 180 degrees from the previous entrance direction (even if I want them to be the other way around after they have settled in.)  I lean some kind of flight barrier against the front of the hive (usually a pallet with a mess of branches woven through it) as a re-orientation prompt.

I also am prepared to use a modified version of Michael Bush's left-behind box tactic.  In that use, a box with a comb or two is deployed at the old stand late in the day on the old location after the move, for about 1-3 days.  This box catches any truly confused bees that keep returning to the old site.  After dark you carry the L/B box to the new stand, and using Bush's instructions, set it down snout to snout with the entrance to the moved colony.  The confused bees, smelling their home will toddle in overnight. Since this has to be done in the dark and interferes with the placement of the foliage in the reorientation barrier, I have modified the process.

This is my modification: before I strap down the stack in anticipation of the move I put a bee escape board down in place of the inner cover.  Then if any clueless bees go in the left-behind box at the old site, all I need to do is carry them in the box to the hive and remove the top of the stack and plunk the box, with bees inside, on top of the stack.  They negotiate their way down into the hive with no problem.  Late in the following day I remove the now-empty left-behind box from the stack at the new site and return it to the old site to catch any second (or third-day) stragglers.  I have only had a third-day straggler issue once in dozens of moves of this length.

If you didn't have a tractor to do the lift, strapping the stack to a hand cart would work just as well, I think, though perhaps bumpier for the bees.  We do our initial move after dark, with the bees temporarily penned in during the transport, then opened and blockaded with the pallet/foliage re-orientation. In the late afternoon of the next day I look at the old site to assess whether I'll need to deploy the left-behind box at all. I'd say it's only needed about half the time.

When moving a group of colonies away from the winter stand, I move the strong ones in the first round(s).  And the healthiest ones before any dodgy ones. 

Nancy 

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