I’ve been needing to move a couple of colonies from my old apiary site on one side of the house to a new site on the other side of the house for a while and planned to have it all sorted this winter, but other things just got in the way. With the relatively poor weather recently causing the bees to mainly stay indoors I decided this week was the time, so one evening I blocked the hive entrances with foam and the following morning strapped up the hives and barrowed them to the new location.
I’d left the entrances closed up as the weather was fairly poor anyhow, but yesterday evening opened them up again after dark so they could get out this morning.
I had a quick check this morning and there were bees doing orientation flights around the hives, so that looked good. I went to collect the old hive stands, but found a few dozen moody bees hanging around on the stands, clearly having flown from the new site and returned to the old one. There’s probably not much useful I can do about that and as it’s only a very small number of bees it doesn’t seem worth putting much effort into. A later check of the hives showed bees flying and bringing in pollen so clearly some of them have got the idea.
