# Moved hives 150 yards, resulted in failed reorientation or unintended fly back split?



## RayMarler (Jun 18, 2008)

Of course a hive could have swarmed. But I do not think so. I think it's foragers flyback from 6 moved hives. Yes, seriously, that many. All foragers from 6 hives moved 150 yards away. Yep, that's what much more than likely happened.


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## Riverderwent (May 23, 2013)

NY14804 said:


> Your opinions please?


Fly back. The queen cells’ survival and the lack of new eggs until a week after the new queens emerge will tell the tale.


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## NY14804 (Feb 8, 2016)

Riverderwent said:


> The queen cells’ survival and the lack of new eggs until a week after the new queens emerge will tell the tale.


That was my plan...inspect them in about a week from now, looking for eggs to verify if a mated queen had traveled with them.

Thank you RayMarler & Riverderwent for your quick responses!


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## enjambres (Jun 30, 2013)

Robber screens are not very effective as reorientation prompts. 

I do not think your (moved) hives swarmed and selected the old location as their new home. They just flew back to the old location. In other words, I think the queens in the moved hives are not likely now at the old location crowding out the development of the new colonies.

If the moved hives have actually swarmed they are likely elsewhere, if not in your swarm traps. (Some people have luck trapping their own swarms, but I don't think it is as effective as it is hoped to be - more happenstance than anything.)

Is seems to me that you have one too-many manipulations bumping into each other here. If you wanted to do fly-back splits as a swarm-management tactic, then that should have been done without the added move of the parent colonies so far away. Once the splits "took", i.e. the two new ones had acquired enough bees and settled down in earnest to raise themselves new queens, and once the parent colonies had released _some bees_, but not all of the oriented ones, to the splits and they had shown evidence of having settled down out of their swarm preps, then you could have moved the parent hives that to the new location as a separate goal (if that was your intent), with more effective reorientation prompts in place and the use of a left behind box (See Michael Bush's very useful instructions on that score).

And as process suggestion: despite the dismal weather of this season waiting until May 22 for the first sort through after winter, was probably asking for trouble re swarming. (Note I am in upstate NY, too.) Earlier inspections and interventions might have kept the two ones that were showing swarm signs (charged cells) from needing to be split at the same time as the move. Please don't be offended at this suggestion - I only manged to get in my hives around the same time, too, this year. And I have fewer excuses since I live at the same place as my hives, which it sounds like you don't. But I made notes to myself (as in the Face Palm and Slap Forehead type of notes) that I needed to manage my bee work a bit better next year in order to not have too many urgent things that must be done _simultaneously._

Nancy


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## NY14804 (Feb 8, 2016)

Nancy - Thanks for your comments! I have enjoyed your previous insightful postings (especially about upstate NY beekeeping issues) and no offense was taken at all to your comments, so no problems there.

For all, here's the background info: Originally last week's plan was to just inspect the hives' progress, clean the bottom boards and move the hives to their new location. Moving the hives was the priority, due to property neighbors' and visiting grand-kids' concerns last year. I've been waiting (to move them) for 5-6 weeks for the weather to cooperate and the ground to dry out enough so my transporting pickup truck wouldn't get stuck in the wet clay farm field soil. It's impossible to do this when the ground has been squishy and saturated with water for this long! 5-6 days of rain every week with high winds and cold temperatures the last month or so were not helping.

I had no intentions of splitting hives and I wasn't going to try & prevent swarming.

I wasn't going to leave a box for any fly back bees either, much to the disagreement of my beekeeping helper and most beekeepers. I planned to let the bees that failed to reorient figure it out that the hives were moved and they could go searching for them. Having a box there may have been too much encouragement for them to stay.

The nuc-size double chamber queen castle came into play at the last moment, after discovering the swarm cells. My beekeeping helper has two very recently queenless hives and we decided if we saw numerous swarm cells during inspection that we would put some of them in the split nuc to let them hatch and get mated in my apiary area before transporting any of their new laying queens (new nucs) 72 miles back to his home.

I've never had any known problems of my bees reorienting when previously blocking the entrance using small branches of white cedar they had to work there way through.
This was my test to see if robbing screens would force a reorientation and it did work somewhat, as there is still plenty of traffic in & out of the moved hives. They also had many frames of capped brood who will only know the new hive location shortly. Who can say for sure the massive fly back wouldn't have happened if I used my usual cedar branches instead?

I don't want or need more than my existing 6 hives this year. I hope the two possible swarm cell hives succeed for my friend's sake and use. We're just taking advantage of the bonus situation that presented itself. 

I will keep adding drawn comb to the two new hives now filled with old foragers to have them fill them with honey, again looking at it as an unexpected bonus while they die off over the next few weeks.


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## enjambres (Jun 30, 2013)

Well, just to clarify,the idea of a Left-Behind box is just a temporary bivouac for confused bees and just for a few days. You put it out only in the late afternoon (or right before inclement weather) when the bees are at risk of dying from exposure if they can't find their way back home.

This is what Michael Bush describes, and I have taken his excellent idea and enlarged on it slightly. 

He suggests just putting it out in the late afternoon, and then moving it after dark (when any confused bees may have entered it) by hand carrying it to the new location and leaving it nose to nose with moved hive. 

I always have substantial reorientation prompts (i.e. a shipping pallet with evergreen branches woven through it) leaning against the front of my moved hives so placing a box nose-to-nose in the dark always seemed too fraught with problems.

I solve this by installing a bee escape board at the top of the moved hived. I actually install it before moving the hive so I can leave it in place for a few days w/o opening the hive shortly after it has been moved, when fewer bees will have oriented on the new location.

Then late in the afternoon of the first day after the move, I set a box on a temp base at the old location and leave it to see if it "catches" any confused bees. After dark I take the box to the new location and open the lid of the moved hive and simply plunk the Left Behind box on top of the bee escape board and let the bees figure out how to rejoin their sisters below. In the morning, I remove it and set it aside near where I will deploy it again that afternoon. Usually it only takes a couple of days before any hub-bub at the old location to die down and no bees will be in the Left-Behind box, so you can stop doing that.

It works like a charm, in my experience. I move my hives 50 to 300 feet fairly frequently as they winter all bunched together on a single stand and then in the spring I separate them again. (Most years, some busy years find them in September exactly where they were the previous March.)

One difference between my moving technique and MB's is that I now always carry the moved hive in a single strapped-together-six-ways-to-Sunday unit. (Four ratchets: two around the hive and second pair around the hive but with enough slack to accept the huge hook on a tow chain wrapped around the bucket.) We suspend it from the bucket of our farm tractor and my husband has gotten so skilled that he can lift a five deep hive and shift it around so lightly that the bees never know they're traveling around until they look out their front entrance the first time. This also allows all the bees to be moved at once with no confused stragglers en route. Usually we move just after dark, so they wake up in the new location. I trot along side steadying the hive so it doesn't get to swinging around as we clamber up hill and down. 

Nancy


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## Bdfarmer555 (Oct 7, 2015)

Fly back definitely. Congrats, you definitely delayed swarming from 6 hives, as they now have little to no nectar coming in. They will be fine again in a week or so, as more bees get assigned foraging duties and orient to the new spot. 

I did virtually the same thing with a friends triple deep hive. They had swarm cells and were close to flying. Set the top 2 boxes (with the queen) in a new spot, bottom box with swarm cell or 2 stayed in same location. Placed a medium super with only foundation on top. By the next day, the original location hive was packed with bees. 

After 3 weeks, we found brood, a new queen, and a fully drawn medium full of honey being capped. The queen right section had no signs of swarming intentions, or break in brood indicating they had swarmed, and had just began drawing comb in their super at the 3 week mark.


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

I would not have installed robber screens at the same time as moving them. They are confusing to the bees as it is, but a move combined with adding them would be very confusing. The old field bees will fly back to the old location until they die, but if you get them to reorient, they will fly back to the old location and then turn and go to the new location. If you want to get the confused bees back to the new location, put the box out near dark after they have had to look for the new location. Then move that box after dark right next to the new location. The next morning you can shake them out in front of the new location.


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