My own experience moving hives short distances is mixed: once I followed
the technique of moving the hive and putting up a box at the old location
late in the day to collect and re-locate the stragglers to the new location.
( New location had substantial barriers to prompt relocation.) It took
about three days of collecting the stragglers (fewer and fewer each day)
until the move was complete with little apparent loss of field force. The
distance was about 175 feet. I tried to repeat this technique a few weeks
later (mid-Sept.) with two other hives, traveling about 200 feet. One colony
did OK, (though not as complete, or as swift, as the first one) but the
other, on the first night, and in a driving rainstorm, suddenly began walking
back to the old location en masse, like a bunch of demented army ants. In
desperation I un-did the move and returned the boxes back to where they were
before the move but there was still a huge loss of bees (though not the
queen who I believe never left the hive bodies). Something about that
particular colony, or its situation, must have been different, though I have no
idea what it might be.
Later in the year (Dec. 6 th) I moved all three hives about 400-600 feet to
their winter stand. I moved the hives on a day after there had been temps
warm enough to fly out, but on a morning when I knew the afternoon temps
would begin falling and stay down for a few days. We moved the hives by
lifting the entire stack in one piece, firmly strapped together, suspended
from the bucket of our tractor and slowly and very gently traveled to the new
location. I was worried that this might jar the cluster but the lift and
re-set were light as a feather. I'm in northern NY and I had planned for
three-to-five days of cold, non-flying weather to strengthen the
re-orientation. As it happened, last winter being unusually cold and relentless, I had
more than 6 weeks of temps too-cold for any flying after the day of the
move. And even after all that time, and with strong physical barriers in front
of the entrances, I had some bees fly out for cleansing flights on the
first warm-enough day and die on the snow at the old locations faster than I
could find and rescue them.
In this case, a very long period inside and considerable barriers at the
entrance still weren't sufficient to re-orient all of the bees successfully.
Perhaps the urgent need to go out over-rode the re-orientation process
for some of them.
I think the folk-wisdom that you can move bees successfully (at any
season) only if you move them more than a mile (or two or three, depending on who
you ask) for some period of time, may just conceal from beekeepers the
losses that any significant move entails for the bees.
Nancy
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