Slough, Windsor and Maidenhead Beekeepers' Society

 
 Stephen Jones made a perfectly valid observation, in May I think, when he moved one of his hives about 20 metres. According to Hooper’s Law the flying bees should have returned to the old site, having not had the wit to re-orientate themselves, if they happened be out foraging when the hive was moved. There is also a theory that foragers check their bearings on the first flight in the morning and rely on the autopilot for the rest of the day, which would also result in a confused and unruly heap of waifs and strays at the old site. There’s no hive to settle in, no queen to get things going again and no operations manual that will tell them what to do when they are in this particular frying pan.

I say operations manual because bees have a range of responses to stimuli programmed into them by evolution 13 million years ago and they ain’t going to change now –at least on any sort of time scale that we can appreciate. One of those responses is absconding, as far as we know, established to allow the colony to escape relatively intact when the home tree was threatened by a forest fire (hence the frying pan analogy). Unfortunately there was nobody around in those days who wanted to dig up the tree and move it 20 metres and so the bees never needed to develop a strategy to deal with our hive moving situation.
    This, I believe is the basis for Hooper’s Law and the 3ft and 3 miles is just a snappy  and simple way of way of remembering it.

That brings us to what we might call Jones’ Anomaly to establish the fact that Stephen noticed it first and to prevent me from claiming the credit for reporting it.  Yes, I had an almost identical occurrence last September when I moved two hives from one end of a row of five to the other, a distance of about 20ft. One was a large nucleus and moved without trouble but the other was a full 14 x 12 and by evening had left about 500 bees behind, flying around close to where the hive entrance had been.  I could afford to lose 500 from this colony so I did nothing. The following morning they’d all gone and I retired rejoicing that they’d followed the colony to its new site. But had they?

There are three possible places they might have gone:-    
Down the pub. No! Ridiculous! Yes but I put it in because it’s what you probably would have done if you’d come home and found your house had disappeared. We have to constantly remind ourselves that bees don’t think the way we do and probably don’t think at all.
They dutifully followed their mates to the old hive on its new site. This is what we wanted to happen and probably did, but
don’t forget the rest of the original colonies, your strays might have scattered across them and there settled down to productive work.  Unlikely, there are guards stationed at the alien hive entrances to keep them out.
   
But Hooper’s Law wants us to think that they are going to stay put, make a thorough nuisance of themselves and finally peter out. This is one occasion when the poor and disadvantaged bees behave exactly like poor and disadvantaged human beings.

Now for a slight and brief change of direction. Those of you who have had the privilege of seeing a swarm hived by the barbarous and risky “throwing” method will have had pointed out a curious reaction by some of the bees. Throwing involves taking the swarm, usually in a cardboard box, and throwing it out onto a temporary ramp up to the entrance of an empty hive. The bees land in a great struggling, scrambling heap, sort themselves out and start running up the ramp and into the hive. The first ones to the top turn tail, point their backsides at the wild blue yonder and beat their wings like mad. This posture exposes scent glands on their backs and blows a pheromone with the message “this way home, ladies” to encourage the swarm into the hive PDQ and round up the stragglers in the air around.  In other circumstances a few guard bees at the hive entrance can be seen fanning in this way and providing guidance for the small numbers of foragers on the wing. 
 
This may be a primitive (or possibly highly efficient) ground approach system for the flying bees although rather dependent on the strength and direction of the wind.  If the old site was downwind of the new site it could, in my opinion, have easily called in Stephen and my dirty stopouts.

At certain times of the year, I believe, mankind in the form of Farmer Wurzel, drives a cart and horses through this well ordered system by growing monocultures with vast numbers of flowers open at the same time. In the rush to exploit this sudden bounty I think the ground approach system breaks down.  The foragers are too busy working the same fields to re--orientate and the guard bees are too busy guarding and unloading the crop to fan.  For the period of the flow it’s all hands to the pumps and to the devil with the consequences.   Along comes Fred Smith the beekeeper, who has read Bernhard Schumann’s advice to get the rape honey extracted before it sets, and takes the hives home. Fred is standing next to his hives wondering where  all his bees have got to when Wurzel rings up to thank him for removing the hives, but would he now come and get the bees.   During a good flow as much as 60% of a colony’s population will be foraging. A flow can switch off overnight so, the following morning they can all be out with nothing to do. To come home with no home to come home to is the last straw.   There’s nothing in the evolutionary operations manual to cover this. Furthermore, at this time with all the nectar coming in the environs of the hives must reek of it and overwhelm the pheromones, even if the wind is in the right direction.
So now we have very large numbers of bees isolated from home and Hooper’s Law in all its glory. Murphy’s Law also applies because this tends to happen at the end of a flow. You have, in all innocence, put your hives on your side up against next-doors orchard fence. The weather is fine the apple is in full bloom and your neighbour likes to set up his deckchair in the shade of the big Bramley.  The gentle hum soon sends him off but he wakes up with a fine view of the number of bees working the tree above him and this has him up and next door looking for action. You explain that this normal foraging and he starts foaming at the mouth. You move the hives that night, right to the other side and end of the garden, and next morning there are less bees in the tree and more everywhere else. Your neighbour, trapped indoors, can be seen through his picture window making, or trying to make, phone calls to you, the police, the council and the local paper. I won’t go on but it is one of the experiences which you only have once.
Flows are so dependent on the weather that they are virtually unpredictable but the outcome can be so disastrous that they deserve some sort of advice from the expert. Just because the rape is in full bloom it doesn’t mean that it’s yielding nectar,

So here we have Hooper writing his textbook and feeling he ought to say something about when to move hives:-
The first choice is the blindingly obvious:-
“Don’t put your hives in such a stupid place to start with”. Much good that is.
“Move your hives whenever you need to.”  That will see you right, say, 80% of the time and, with luck, someone else will clear up the mess for you when it goes wrong.  
 “3ft and 3 miles” isn’t called Hoopers Law and doesn’t apply all the time, but you ignore it at your peril.
And that appears to be good enough for Hooper and I.

BUT here’s another one. “Worker bees always return to their own hive”.  Get yourself a New Zealand queen in the spring and turf out one of your British Black B*****s.  NZ bees are much lighter coloured than ours so her progeny will be easy to spot as they mix in that hive, and slowly all the others.
Of course you haven’t forked out £25 for a new queen just to watch genes mix. As the new queen’s progeny slowly replace the old you’ll be gratified by how docile your bees become. As you rejoice and throw away the leather gauntlets you’ll want to tell your friends of your good fortune. While your friends are going off like frightened fireworks listen and collect more examples of rules which “ain’t necessarily so”. Welcome to a world where you have to deal with the ficklety of nature.

By the way, the three articles “My Old Man 1 – 3” in the Archives have some relevance to this subject.