Moving a beehive over a short distance

A Moving Experience

I'm in the process of expanding my bees, planning to split all three of my hives to give me six which should give me some honey this year. I'm setting up a new apiary in a neighbour's field where I already have one hive, and my intention was to move the less visually appealing poly hive at the bottom of the garden to this new apiary.

But there's a small problem: the distance between the current position and the new apiary is only 181m (as measured on Google Maps), and the experts claim that bees can only be moved 3 feet or 3 miles, anything in between resulting in the the foragers returning to the original hive location. However, it appears that the real trick is not simply 3ft/3miles, but rather 3ft/3miles/3days and it's possible to trick the bees in to reorientating so that they return to the new location.

So on Saturday evening when the bees had all gone to bed, I sealed up the hive with sponge and gaffer tape, tying straps around it to help against accidents. On Sunday afternoon, a friend helped me carry the hive to the car (with its two brood boxes, it's quite heavy) and we drove it the short distance to its new home, setting it up where it should be in the future.

On Monday morning, I placed a leafy branch across the entrance and opened it up. The bees clustered under the branch and all seemed fine, so I went home. Unfortunately, a number of bees turned up back at the original site, so I placed a nuc there. That evening I checked and probably 50 bees or so were hanging around, and ultimately succumbed to the cool weather. The following day, the same happened and I lost another 50 bees. I decided to investigate and found that the hive at the new location no longer had its obstruction branch in place, blown aside by the strong winds.

The Right Way

So what went wrong or, more importantly, how should this be done correctly? It's clear that the 3/3/3 theory is actually correct, so if you're moving bees a distance between 3 feet and 3 miles, This is the way to do it:

• Lock them in and keep them locked in for 3 days. If the weather is warm, make sure the hive is in a shady spot and have enough water.
• Place the hive in the new location.
• Place a leafy branch across the entrance and make sure it can't be blown away by the wind.
• Open the hive entrance.
• Do NOT place a nuc or similar on the original site - with no shelter, they seem to realise where they should be and go back to the hive.

While there may be stragglers that turn up at the original site, when they can't find anywhere to call home, they'll fly back to the correct new location of the hive. Of course some will almost certainly not make it, but from my experience, this is how to do it with minimal loss to your bees.