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I think that the danger of putting up a sign saying 'Danger; Bees' is that one makes it more or less certain that some timid soul will then complain about the dangerous bees.... In terms of liability, we are luckily some way behind the US in terms of recourse to law, which has become their...

Caveat: I'm a beginner (second season) so please take my observations with a pinch of salt. But they might be helpful or at least prompt better informed comments from others... I wanted to try the Demaree method of Swarm Pre-emption rather than merely relying upon Swarm Prevention (I'm probably...

Can I just say... ....Speaking as a very new beek I have found this beginners' forum a really excellent source of advice to back-up, modify and occasionally to refute the stuff one reads in the books. Thank you to the various much more experienced contributors who painstakingly answer the...

As an update, by yesterday there were very few bees around the old site and so I think that by today they will have successfully re-orientated. So, it's taken about 5 days but as far as I can see there has been a minimal loss of bees. Might well have been better if I'd known and followed...

Thanks Dani. Just so I'm clear what 'just nuc the queen' means... Take the Queen and some frames of BIAS (up to 5) and put them in a nuc. She won't swarm because she's lost the flying bees, right? The donor box will now presumably make EQCs which can be destroyed so that after 5 days or so they...

I've been reading Wally Shaw's guide to the Snelbrove II manipulations in response to finding QCs in the colony. The basics I think I grasp. Upon finding evidence of SQCs, move most of the brood plus the Queen to a new BB adjacent to the target hive (he calls this part the Parent Colony)...

Yup, that's a disaster I'd like to avoid if I can. Awful pictures. The downside of moving the hives from their previous position is that they now no longer have a large brick wall to shelter from westerlies behind - although I was at one stage during Eunice seriously worried that the brick wall...

Fair point. Of course by autumn the top two lifts will be off again and the hives will be only three lifts high. I'm also going to put in some hurdle fencing on the windward side in anticipation of another Storm Eunice (which blew over the hen-house :oops:). But I do agree that as soon as one...

I'm not sure that I understand. They are pretty stable and each is on a stone plinth on wooden beams for levelling. I very much hope that they are not precarious.... The tall one (the Demaree) does look a little top-heavy, I grant you, but it's also pretty heavy and so sits firmly on its feet...

I moved the poly nuc last night at about 6. It was absolutely full to the brim with bees, with around half again clinging to the outside. I shook the bees into the three hives and we'll see what today brings.

That's a good idea. Thanks.

I too have added strips to the outside of all of my supers. At first I couldn't work out if I was: a) being thick; or b) had something on the wrong way round, as I found it very difficult to line up the supers such that there was no gaps. The strips work a treat, 'though.

OK, I'll give that a go. Thanks.

And a short vid of bees doing some foraging at the new site.

And some clearly didn't get the memo and are clustered on the empty nuc at the old location.

Here are the hives in their new location.

With a friend we moved the three hives at about 1830 last night, after most of the bees had gone to bed. We moved them on the back of a landrover to their new site which is around 150m from the old one (I'd decided against the original idea of moving them 400m). I closed up the hives overnight...

I've decided that I have no choice but to move them and accept the consequences. At present all three colonies have queens that are laying well and there is an abundance of bees. So I'm guessing that, worst case, I'll lose a proportion of the flying bees from each colony, before they are...

Not whilst gardening.

Thank you James. That's encouraging. I've just done a recce on a potential new site at the end of the paddocks and when I got back I found my wife gardening in her bee-suit because she'd been stung yet again :(. So I think that I'm just going to have to move them and accept whatever negative...