Moving the bees....

I moved my beehive this week over to my friend Doug’s house. I have been moving towards getting some work done on my back yard and no one wants to do any work with a beehive in residence.

So I learned a bit about moving bees this week. My first naïve attempt consisted of nailing a simple board over the entryway early in the morning (before the bees get active) and then attempting to load the bees on a trolley to roll to the front of the house and the awaiting truck. This did not go so well, the loading of the hive on the trolley caused a bit of flexing in the whole hive structure and the understandably excited bees started to leak out of various newly created openings. I was equipped for such events with my veil and gloves on, but alas my friend Brian was not so equipped and got stung (sorry about that Brian). Anyway, the whole thing turned into a disaster with me trying to nail on additional strips of wood to better close off the hive and more and more bees getting excited and escaping. Time to leave things for another day and some more careful thought.

I went to the bee shop and consulted with the owner who saw the humor in my naïve attempts, and who sold me a purpose built closure that closes the entry with a mesh structure – thereby still allowing the bees to breathe – good idea that.

So last Monday, I fitted the closure, and I added my own touch of copious amounts of duct tape. The tape just gave me the confidence that no other openings would appear from flexing of the hive tower. It then was a smooth operation of rolling the bees to the front of the house, lifting them into Brian’s truck bed and carefully driving to their new residence (commercial bee keepers do this all the time, but there was something worrisome about driving the streets with a hive of bees in the back of the truck – I was imagining the newspaper headlines the next day – Amateur Beekeeper loses control of hive outside Kindergarten – lawsuits to follow).

The bees are now happily installed about a mile or so away and seem to be well, though a few bees returned to my back yard and gathered on the fence where the hive was located. I guess they didn’t quite re-program their directional finding senses. I thought they would either disperse or die of exposure in the night, but some 6 days later they are still there (see below) – huddled on the fence. I feel bad for them, but not much I can do about that.