Slough, Windsor and Maidenhead Beekeepers' Society

I suppose I’ve always been a sceptic but as a new beekeeper it seemed wisest to listen-up and learn. So I read the books and gratefully attended the apiary sessions to gain practical experience under the close supervision of my mentors.

I’m not sure what aroused my suspicions originally. I suppose it was conflicting advice on simple things, like whether to smoke the entrance or under the crown board, or both, or not at all.

But slowly I came to the conclusion that many beekeeping practices aren’t rational.

For sure much of the time such personal idiosyncrasies don’t matter because bees don’t read books either, but in May this year I had a serious problem.

Due to inexperience I placed both my hives too close to my neighbour’s house. I had assumed a six foot high fence and overhanging tree would suffice in keeping the bees away, but one Sunday morning my neighbour was stung whilst sitting in his garden. The hives would have to be moved.

The new location was 20 meters away. Mindful of a rough practical rule which says bee colonies should be moved ‘under 3 feet or over 3 miles’’(Guide to Bees and Honey Ted Hooper Page 81. ISBN 0 7137 0782 8) I was in a quandary. The hives were too big and heavy to move to an out apiary. I checked with my mentors who confirmed the 3 feet or 3 mile rule. It looked like the only option was to try and move two colonies 3 feet every 3 or so days. It would be the end of July before the hives would arrive at their new site.

Initially I didn’t question the rule because it seemed entirely plausible that after millions of years nesting in trees, bees would not expect their ‘tree’ to go walk-about.

However, if beekeeping practices aren’t rational and bees don’t read books, then maybe there was another way.

The internet is a wonderful thing and it wasn’t long before I found articles describing how to relocate hives in just one move. Worryingly though, there were even more that repeated the 3 feet mantra.

What to do? If the ‘move it in one go’ advocates were raving lunatics then I would have thousands of angry bees buzzing around the neighbourhood looking for their home.

On balance it seemed to me that the ‘move it in one go’ corpus were credible, so one evening when the bees had stopped flying, we moved the hives.

The small hive contained a recently acquired swarm that was already on two Rose boxes. It was relatively light, so after blocking the entrance, my fearless beekeeping buddy and I lifted the entire hive and moved it to its new location.

The large hive was another matter. Four weeks earlier I’d acquired the colony from Denis and already the hive consisted of one BN brood box plus three Rose boxes. It was seriously heavy and impossible to move intact. We were going to have to split it.

The roof was removed to reduce the weight and then we cracked open the hive and quickly slid a piece of hardboard between the two top and bottom boxes. Just a few bees escaped as we lifted the top boxes off and placed them on a spare floor with the entrance blocked.

We then carefully moved the bottom half of the hive to its new location. Thus far, so good, but the tricky bit was coming up.

In order to place the top boxes back on the hive we were going to have to remove the hardboard. The combined weight of the two boxes was easily 50 kg (Rose boxes are larger than BN supers) and without a third assistant, one of us was going to have to flick the hardboard out of position as we simultaneously lowered the top boxes.

It worked but inevitably a few hundred angry bees flew up, and having buzzed us for a few minutes, they flew back to the old hive location.

Fortunately we had anticipated this, and had placed an inverted cardboard box on the old site, suitably propped up to allow the bees to climb in.

They didn’t. Instead they clustered on the ground underneath the box. By now it was getting quite dark and cold, so we scooped the bees up and carried them back to the hive on the new site and shook them down gently in front of the hive entrance, which had been reopened.

To our relief most of the bees walked into the hive, but a few score that got airborne returned to the old site, and made a little cluster. This was also scooped up and placed in front of the hive, and the bees walked in.

The portents weren’t good. Those bees that had got airborne had flown back to the old hive location; there was going to be mayhem in the morning.

One critical aspect of relocating hives ‘in one move’ is to disorient the bees when they leave the hive the following day, and thereby force them to re-orientate to the hive’s new position. This involves placing branches around the hive entrance.

However, the information on the internet was rather vague about how many branches, so erring on the side of caution, we placed a small forest around each hive. The bees wouldn’t just be disoriented; they would need the skills of Houdini to escape.

The following morning I approached the apiary with dread. The sun had been up for several hours and much to my relief I could see the foraging bees returning to the hives. I cautiously approached the original apiary location but there was nothing to see except a few bees milling around before flying on to the hives.

It was as if the bees had returned from foraging on autopilot and then remembered the hive had moved, and after a quick circle of the old site, flew on to the new.

I left the branches in place for a few days, removing some each day to make hive access easier. But I suspect I needn’t have bothered because the bees had already re-orientated to their new location.

So much for Ted Hooper’s ‘rough practical rule’; it’s not practical and it’s certainly not a rule. Rather it’s a myth that has gained currency by often being repeated.