Hi! I have a dead tree that a hive has been living in for several years. The tree recently fell onto my roof and we later rolled it onto the ground. The hive is still intact and we were wondering how to move the tree and keep the bees safe when we heard of the flow hive. We have left the dead tree alone in anticipation of receiving the flowhive in December.
Any thoughts on how to move them into the flowhive when it arrives? I am new to beekeeping and I am interested in suggestions on books for newbies.
At this point I don’t really care how long the move takes, the dead tree has been blocking a walkway next to our house well over a year now. Just excited to eventually move the tree and have a pretty box there instead.
I would upload pictures but I am a new user to the website. When my restrictions are lifted I will post pictures to the general forum - the hive is so beautiful and multifaceted !! I can get really close and peer inside without alerting the hive. Bees are really cool
Maybe some of our members who do removals can give you more information, but I’d guess you would want to cut it out of the trunk as you are going to want to bring the comb with brood, and pollen and honey with the bees to your new box. That could be tricky to do carefully, but I’m sure there are a ton of videos on Youtube that would show you how to do it. You can find nearly anything on Youtube. You could do this now into a holding box, but I suppose if the bees don’t seem distressed being on the ground like that then you could leave them till december.
Id agree cutting the log open would be the best approach. Another technique people use sometimes is the “Trap Out”. It can take a while and you may have to re-queen the hive if she doesn’t come with the rest of the bees.
The short version is this, if it’s not between about half a mile and a mile and half you can just move them and put something in front of the hive. How well it goes is related to the distance as the returning bees always fly back to the old place. If you did nothing to trigger their reorientation, they will spiral out until they find a hive and join that hive. If you got them to reorient by putting a branch or other obstruction in front of the hive, they will fly back to the old place and then remember that orientation that morning and fly back to the new place. The old field bees usually do this for the next three weeks (until they die). But it resolves itself. 100 yards works very well. 200 yards takes longer to resolve. A quarter mile is even longer and since they are spiraling out, the increase is exponential. The worst distance to move them is about a mile and a half as that is the distance that virtually every field worker knows their way home and they will all fly back to the old location and it’s a huge spiral to find the new location. They would have to fly for miles to spiral out to 1 1/2 miles.
