"Plan Bee" - Phase 2 complete.

I was up with the dawn chorus (5am) yesterday morning to make sure my girls were ready for their move, but it felt much earlier!  I thought that at 5am in the morning they would still be inside the hive.  A miscalculation!

I had assumed that the evening "beard of bees" (or perhaps more accurately that should be the "5 o'clock shadow" of bees!) that my hives grow in this weather would have moved inside the hive by morning.  Wrong! I reckon the bees actually hang around on the outside all night and then go out foraging at first light.

I saw a few bees leaving the hive at about 5am; so what?, but when I blocked off the main hive entrance and the holes in the other hive bodies, a great cloud of bees appeared from seemingly nowhere and wanted to get back in the hive. Great, so I thought if I move the hives now there will be a huge mass of "straggler" bees all confused and homeless. Guess how long that would take to become a "nuisance". So, I decided to try to "smoke" the stragglers to see if that encouraged them to go inside.

Well, it was like watching water flow down a plug hole!  I "smoked" the bees, then removed the rubber stoppers from the holes that had been drilled in the hive bodies at the start of the season. The bees simply marched in (rushed would be an overstatement) and over the next 10 minutes most stragglers had found their way home.

The rest of the move proved really uneventful. It just shows what having a bit of planning, the correct equipment, a pickup truck and some help can do to smooth the process.  Fred's truck, unknown to us all (and also Fred!) was already perfectly "bee equipped", thanks to the purpose built plank that can be placed across the flat bed, just behind the tailgate. The ratchet straps used to secure the hive parts together were worth their weight in gold (especially as we only had a handful of hive staples), and the hive lifter was a joy to use! Ah, I only have myself to blame for being stung - twice on the foot.  I was wearing sandals - Doh!

So, the bees are now in their new, temporary, home. Any stragglers have a super waiting for them in their old home (empty after the harvest yesterday), and I plan to take this, and the bees, to the temporary bee yard today, or later in the week. We will wait a couple of weeks before moving them all back to their new home in the back garden - once we find a suitable location!

Phase 3 - moving them home - is likely to be the 17th or 24th of July. Better tell the city what we did this weekend!