Moving bees at four hours notice

Well that was fun, we were up till 1.00am moving bees from our Oil Seed Rape site. A neighbouring property owner had been stung and was worried about his young child. So we moved 23 of the on site colonies last night,leaving three colonies to catch returning foragers as the new site is less than a mile from the existing so many of the older bees will pick up on their old flight paths. What made it more fun was the fact that we had just added two or more supers over new and very slippy plastic queen excluders and it was a warm evening which meant the bees were active even after dark.
All hives were moved open which for us is standard practice, this can cause problems with crawlers (bees walking on clothing and vehicle interior) but the bees suffer less heat stress and it saves all the worry about sealing up hives and fitting travelling screens
We ended up with hives stacked three high so that was six boxes from the floor of the pick ups. Got stung more times than I could count, and was more than ready for my bed when we finished. But is was good fun and am going out tonight to finish the job. The remaining 12 queens we ordered have arrived this morning in the post, we will be introducing them into nucleus hives before moving the remaining colonies.



Twelve new queens arrive from Cyprus this morning