All the rest of the bees went then inside the hive on their own after we
fully assembled the warre.
The harsh part was to let the brood die and seeing new bees being born but
unable to fly to go to the hive
On 25 Apr 2019, at 20:33, Mags (Redacted sender "magalie.valadier" for DMARC)
<dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hello everyone,
I just wanted to share what we have been doing with our new arrival.
My husband got some bees from a neighbour for his Warre hive, these bees were
about half a mile away from us.
The lady was getting rid off a her whole hive as she needed the equipment
back as spare for her other 3 hives.
We had to decide on whether moving them first to a new location more than 3
miles away for a few weeks or moving them straight to us but using a few
tricks to force them reorientate and not fly back to their original hive spot.
We decided to move them straight to our garden as we felt it would also be
quite disruptive for them to move place twice, plus the risk of something
going wrong whilst driving them 30 min away.
The move on the first night went relatively smoothly, we went at around 7:30
pm to have the last bees come in and ceiled the entrance with foam and duck
tape, we strapped the hive with 2 ratchet straps, cling filmed the hive
around. That was rather good as the boxes started to separate slightly as we
pushed the hive into the car and thanks to the cling film the bees stayed
safe in the hive. We were only driving for 5 min so we weren’t too worried
about the ventilation.
We then brought the hive to it’s new place and removed the cling film.
I had prepared a bee tea syrup with fresh flower and herbs from the garden as
they were going to stay locked in.
We added the feed from a top feeder and kept the hive entrance ceiled for 2
days, as it was quite hot I added a big umbrella to keep the hive in the
shade.
After 48hrs around 6pm we tied loads of twigs and branches in front of the
entrance and removed the ceil.
The results were that only 20 bees went back to the original hive spot. So a
very good success! They then stayed here happy foraging for 4-5 days and
today we transferred them into the Warre hive.
The transfer went as follow:
We used the recommendation from Gareth took the brood box and removed the
queen excluder added the transfer board to fit the warre hive on top. Smoked
them from underneath and drummed them for 10min. 10 min of non stop drumming
is a lot longer than I thought!
After a while I looked through the observation window and saw a cluster of
bees in the top box so we added it to the floor of the warre. There were
still plenty of bees left on the frame of the combs with brood, we were not
too sure whether the queen was transferred but then we saw some bees entering
the Warre so we took this as a signal that the queen must be in. We then
added another box on top of the warre where the cluster was and brushed off
all the bees from the frames of the brood box and did the same with the frames
Of the super. Between start to end including tidying up all the equipment
moving all the frames away and taking the old hive away, it took us 3 hrs
between the 2 of us!
All the rest of the bees went then inside the hive on their own after we
fully assembled the warre. We extracted their honey to feed it back to them.
And they are currently all clustered inside the top box, so fingers cross
they will build some new combs very soon.
The harsh part was to let the brood die and seeing new bees being born but
unable to fly to go to the hive, the combs and brood all looked really
healthy.
I thought it was very interesting that actually we can move a hive less than
3 miles.
I will keep you posted in the next few days, I think it’s good start and
really praying that the Queen is really in there.
Magalie
