>Re Peter B's comment about a left-behind box being exactly the wrong thing to do.

I agree, well, sort of.  But I what I wrote wasn't as clear as it should have been.  I wasn't suggesting you leave the box continuously at the old site after moving the hive.  You only put it out just before darkness (or cold front arrival) as an emergency shelter for any bees that have no time left to re-locate their colony at new site.

I usually spend the last half-hour of daylight watching the former site of the colony on the first day after a move. If there are confused bees, unsuccessful at solving on their orientation problem, and landing on the ground or branches near the location just before nightfall, only then do I deploy the L/B box to collect them and get them back to their colony.

Commercial beekeepers will scoff at this attention to a handful of bees. But for smaller operations, and hobby beekeepers having another alternative to the (in)famous three-feet or three-mile part in the Received Wisdom of Beekeeping cannon is helpful. A left-behind box is a simple, highly successful way to handle a potential problem that sometimes occurs with a short-distance move.

Aside from using a bee-escape board in place of the inner cover to simply the rejoining of the two parts, what I do differently from Mr. Bush's technique is move the whole, strapped-together stack in one go, rather than in separate boxes as he describes.  I found I had far fewer confused stragglers or slow learners (and thus far less need for a L/B box at all) when they were all moved together, than when each box was carried off individually. 

In fact the only spectacular failure I have ever had with Bush's method was the time immediately after a box-by-box move when in the near-dark, and in the rain, the bees streamed out of the hive and started to walk back to the old site about 100 feet away.  I had been a beekeeper for only a handful of weeks at that time so I had no idea how extraordinary this behavior was. And it perplexed me for a very long time.  What I now believe was going on was that somehow I had left the queen behind when I was shifting the various pieces of the hive. (That particular queen had a long, subsequent history of leaving boxes during inspections.)  And then in an over-scale replica of a Taranov manouevre the bees discovered their loss, and somehow discovered where she was and determined to rejoin her, no matter what the cost. I hastily moved the boxes back to the old site and made a hideous mess in my efforts to capture the walking bees. Despite my near-disastrous attempt to fix my mistake, both that colony, and that queen, survived for a three more seasons before she was successfully superseded. 

Nancy

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