3 feet, or 3 miles
Think about your flying bees…
When you move a hive, you must either move it less than 3 feet, or more than 3 miles….. or so they say. I thought it’s a shame that they don’t say why, so here we are. A firm understanding of how to split flying bees away from nurse bees is a fundamental skill that comes in very useful when performing splits - most split manipulations rely on you being able to remove flying bees with ease.
You’re going to want to watch this video of the Pagden split first, or read our page on the pagden split.
TODO: Add a pagden split page
Let’s start at the end — 3 miles — and have a think about what happens when we do a Pagden split. The flying bees come darting out of the door to go forage, and when then they come home to drop it off they return to where they think home is and drop off the forage… what they don’t realise is that the door they left wasn’t home. They are in such a hurry that they don’t bother looking back when they leave.
Bees forage in a 3 mile radius of home. If you capture a flying bee toward the end of its life and release it somewhere else – anywhere else – within a 3 mile radius of the hive, it will find its way home. They are incredibly navigators; using landmarks, time of day, position of the sun, etc.
So what happens if you move a hive and it’s new position is within the 3 mile radius of it’s original location? They don’t look back when they go to forage, so when they return home, they do so to the old location… where there is no hive.
Bees use landmarks to navigate. They’re used to living in trees, where they have to navigate branches and leaves to get into their house. When you move a hive 3 feet, the bees will follow their known flight path back to the hive, and find that the hive is no longer there. However, 3 feet away allows the bees to smell their sisters. Often you’ll see a handful of workers fanning nasonov at the entrance later in the day anyway, so any workers returning a bit too late can smell their way home.
You can watch this happen in real time if you move a hive only a few feet to the left or right in the middle of the day. Bees will come zipping back through the air, and seemingly bounce off a force field where the hive used to be… then go “huh, where’s home gone?” and then sit in the air trying to decide where to go. The air will be alive with bees until they re-learn the flight path to the hive after not too long.
Again, to be clear on these “rules of thumb”: They will smell much further than 3 feet, but it’s easy to remember and it’s a very safe number as a rule of thumb. If there’s a hive within even 20ft, they’ll find it for sure, especially if the wind is in their favour. Theres lots of rules that are specifically designed to make it hard to get wrong, but are actually far more flexible than they seem to be. Worry less when you’re moving short distances.
There are cases where this helps, but also times where it’s a hindrance. Simply understanding that flying bees return home is crucial in getting some manipulations right, and also ensuring the survival of splits.
The Pagden split relies upon this for multiple step in the process. You move the old hive (the one with all the brood) away from it’s original location at the start of the manipulation. In this one step, you have removed flying bees from the colony. Later in the process, there’s an optional step when you move the hive over to the other side we again use this to help equalise the number of bees between each colony.
When we make a nuc split, it won’t have flying bees, because flying bees will leave the nuc and return to the original hive. This is primarily why you must include frames of stores, or feed the nuc. The risk of starvation in splits is quite high because they won’t have any foragers.
When moving a hive, or a swarm trap, it’s important to remember what’s going to happen to its foragers. If you move a hive that’s in an apiary with a few other colonies then they’ll find a new colony to call home, but if it’s your only hive or you move the whole apiary some 500m away and the wind isn’t in their favor, they will struggle to find their way home.
Also, if you have a swarm trap out, and leave it there full of bees for a while, close it up at night, and consider The Loophole when moving it.
when shaking out laying workers, there’s two choices to deal with them. One of them relies on flying bees being able to navigate back to the hive, leaving the nurses to fly around aimlessly looking for a new home.
Remember how we said “bees come darting out of the door”…. What if they can’t?
Place a cinder block or a huge piece of wood a few inches from the door, when the bees come out, they will reorient to figure out how to get back into the hive when they return. If you do this, the number of bees you will lose back to the original location reduces dramatically. You will know this is working if you can see a huge cloud of bees reorienting themselves in the morning.