I have heard that if you move a bee hive it should be 3 feet or 3 miles. Nothing in between. Because the bees get disoriented. I need to move my bees on to my property. About 100 yards away from where they are. Is that safe for them to do?
1 Like
I just go ahead and move them:
The only ones that might get lost have but a week or two to live anyway.
Make sure the hive is queen-right first. You don’t want to be moving the hive and have a virgin queen out on a mating flight and then return to a missing hive.
Welcome to the Flow forum! 
As @Anon said, you can move them, but you should expect a few hiccups from the move.
Some people have more success moving a short distance if you put a large shrub or a branch with foliage in front of the hive entrance. This forces the bees to do new orientation flights and makes it more likely that they will remember the new location. After a few days, you can remove it. You will still get some bees at the old location, but usually they fly in increasing size circles until they find the hive again. Just don’t leave anything hive-like (empty boxes, hive stand etc) at the old location, or they may just hang out there in large numbers and refuse to move.
2 Likes
Welcome to the forum, you will find lots of help, tips and advice here.
Last year I had to move my hives (20) twice over the year, each time the new locations were about 70 yards apart and in clear sight.
I locked the bees in after sunset, moved the hives and placed plenty of foliage at the entrance before opening the entrances again.
I places a single box on the old site to pick up the stragglers the next afternoon, all up about 2,000 bees moved into the box that had stickies in it, that box was then merged after 3 days with a weak hive by the newspaper method. All of the returning bee were happy to share the one box although they were from different hives.
So from my experience a short distance move like yours is very doable, But remember when you open the entrance the girls will be really nasty:laughing:.
The 3 feet or 3 miles story so far as I experienced is just a story, if you put stuff about the hive entrance so that they know things are different and they will re-orientate to the new location.
Cheers
2 Likes
Hi Peter, if you put a space between the previous word & the emogj, the emoji will appear, instead of:laughing:, for example 
cheers
1 Like
another option is to move them over 3 miles away- and then move them back to the new spot a week later. Bit of a hassle though…