Moving Beehives

Despite our best efforts to prevent it, a couple of our hives looked as though they were being robbed of their stores.

In fact, ever since I caught a swarm from Clettwr and re-housed it nearby there seem to have been bees happily drifting between the two hives. Recent inspections have shown both hives to have very little, if anything, in the way of stores, so it was time to try to rectify the problem as winter is fast approaching.

On out last inspection only one hive, Leri, seemed to be doing OK. It had quite a few bees in it had drawn out and started filling frames in both supers, although none were by any means full and seemed to be doing well.

The nuc box, Pendam, was a lost cause, having presumably swarmed whilst we were away so had virtually no bees in it.

The other two hives, Clettwr and Syfyddrin had bees, a queen each and eggs and larvae, but no stores. We did think that maybe bees from Leri (which was doing OK) were robbing from these two hives, but as mentioned above we’ve also been aware of the fact that since setting up Syfyddrin with a swarm from Clettwr there seemed to be far too much activity between the two. The bees were always up and active very early in the morning and stayed that way all day long until it got dark, whatever the weather. There were always big clusters of bees on the front of the hives crowding around the entrance blocks, and although it was difficult to tell for sure it looked as though there were bees flying from one hive to the other.

All the activity also made it difficult to enter the ‘apiary’ without protective gear making the bottom of our garden virtually inaccessible.

Robbing Prevention Techniques

We had tried to prevent robbing between the hives as much as possible by closing down the entrances to the hives meaning that the bees only had a small area to defend, but that didn’t seem to work. We had been feeding both hives as they had no stores at all. We were careful to only top up the feed at night once the bees had all stopped flying and not to spill any sugar syrup. None of this seemed to help so it was time to find a suitable location for an out apiary and move one of the hives to it.

Luckily someone Anna works with is thinking of keeping bees herself so we had an ideal place to put a single hive. It was the other side of Aberystwyth, about 10 miles away from here, far in excess of the minimum 3 miles that you have to move bees. It’s in a nice garden with a bit of woodland behind it and not too far from the River Ystwyth where there may even be some Himalayan Balsam growing which will provide the bees with a late season nectar flow. Access to the garden wasn’t too bad for us and it means that the owner gets to see what it like having bees in her garden for a few weeks.

We checked out the lay of the land on Friday and then decided to move them over the weekend.

Moving a Hive

Ready for the move

Ready for the move

We’ve never moved a hive before but it isn’t that difficult. We inspected the bees on Saturday afternoon so that we knew what state they were in before the re-location. During the inspection we placed a couple of roofrack straps around the hive we were going to move. We chose to move Syfydrrin (the hive which housed a caught swarm), simply because it was on a stand of its own so would be easier to move than Clettwr.

Once the bees had settled down for the night I then stuffed a piece of sponge foam into the entrance of the hive, put a piece of duct tape over it to make sure it didn’t come out and then we lifted the whole hive and the stand into the back of the car. Now, the last thing you want to happen whilst driving along with a hive full of thousands of bees is for them to get out in the car. We weren’t expecting this to happen as we were fairly certain that the hive was bee tight, but we wore our bee suits in the car and kept them halfway up just in case . We also had a roll of duct tape at the ready to seal any gaps should the bees find one.

We were fine and not a single bee escaped, but I guess it would have been easy for the hive to move on its floor over one of the speed ramps creating an escape route for the bees, so it was better to be ready for any eventuality than to be in a car full of bees with no access to our bee suits.

A new home

A new home

The hive was soon positioned in its new location and once it was I removed the duct tape and sponge from the entrance block. A couple of bees came out to investigate but not many and all seemed calm.

Happy Apiaries?

It’s too early to tell yet if this has worked as we haven’t re-inspected any of the hives and haven’t heard how the bees are getting on in their new location. I’ll inspect them later this week and hopefully add a super at the same time. However, the apiary in our garden seemed much calmer yesterday. There were bees coming and going from each hive but there seemed to be much less activity around the entrance of Clettwr. Maybe the robbing had stopped. Of course, if it was bees from Leri robbing the hives then Clettwr will still be under attack, but initial signs seem to suggest that we may have put a stop to it and that the problems were indeed caused by bees drifting from the swarm hive to the parent hive.

Lets just hope it isn’t too late and that the bees have time to build up sufficient stores for the winter over the next month or so.

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Alan Cole

Alan is a Freelance Website Designer, Sports & Exercise Science Lab Technician and full time Dad & husband with far too many hobbies: Triathlete, Swimming, Cycling, Running, MTBing, Surfing, Windsurfing, SUPing, Gardening, Photography.... The list goes on.

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