Moving Native Bees
A guest post written by Dean Haley
To move stingless bees successfully, you have to understand a little about their habits and behaviors.
Stingless bees have a homing instinct the same as honey bees do. This lets them fly off and gather pollen and nectar and return to the colony.
You may know about the honey bees waggle dance, where a bee relates the location of a food source in relation to the position of the Sun. Honey bees can navigate by the Sun, and reverse the journey on the way home. While this is remarkable behavior, our stingless bees don’t do it this way. Instead, stingless bees rely on a mixture of sight and smell.
Stingless bees perform orientation flights, which involves them hovering and flying backwards from their home. The first couple of flights a young bee makes may be very short. Just little loops in the air and back to home again. They then fly a bit further and a bit further all the while remembering what home looks like. Experiments have been made where paint is used to mark bees, and they are released at various distances from home. Most bees find home when released 500 metres away, but few make it home when released 600 metres away. So the theory is they can visually recognize the entire territory for a distance of about 500 metres from home.
Moving Native Bees Long Distances
Moving bees more than 500 meters presents no problems. The bees come outside, can’t recognize the place and therefore perform a new orientation flight. New bee owners sometimes stand directly in front of their hive with a worried look on the face when letting the bees out in a new place. This is exactly the wrong place to stand, as this is where the bees need to be flying backwards and remembering.
Moving Native Bees short Distances (less than 5 metres)
The easiest method to move very short distances is by moving the box about 50cm each day. The bees go out of a morning and return to the place they remembered the box to be. You will see a large number of bees hovering in mid air and flying in little circles. You will be amazed that they don’t go to the new position just 50cm away. But they eventually do recognize the entrance to the box, and the smell of home helps too. By this method you can slowly move your bees to a new position.
Moving Native Bees Intermediate Distances
Sometimes I want to move my bees from the front of my house to the back yard, or like I did last week where I took two hives to a friend to pollinate his mandarin tree at his house 250 metres from my own. I use a method where I place the bees in a dark room for 6 days and nights and I put a piece of gauze over the entrance hole so they can breathe. I got this old trick from honey bee keepers where the general rule of thumb is 3 days. I tried 3 days at first but lost some bees. I then discovered some scientific research with honey bees which say that they lose their memories pretty much after 6 days, and almost completely in 9 to 12 days. I don’t know for sure how long the memory lasts for a stingless bee, but I’ve switched over to 6 days with complete success ever since. I find this method so convenient, I can choose to put my bees on the sunny side of my house in Winter, and the shady side of the house in Summer.
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The other way to move them an intermediate distance is to take the hive to a location 1 km away or more. Leave it there a week then move it back to the new location. You reset the bees memory each move. You keep the hive active and don’t have to put it in a dark room.
I have native bees swarming at my front steps, they seem to be building a hive in the crack of the cement in the steps.I would like to keep them in my garden but how do I move them to another position. Any ideas would be most welcome as would any ideas on how to help them live well.
Hello there! Once native bees have positioned themselves in a spot and placed some brood (cells for the queen) they are very hard to move without digging up the earth. You may consider getting them to run through a box in a similar fashion to the “natural hive duplication” post. Can you move what the hive is building in? Kind regards Nick
Dorothy
It can be done, BUT will take a little time.
1. get a box you want them to move into.
2. You need a tube to connect the two hives together.
3. The end that goes into the new hive box you make it one way only. Do this by making a one way flap that you can add latter
4. Rub a rag around the crack to get the scent, and rub the box entrance with it
5. Put the tube in the crack, and seal with silicon. so the bees only use the tube.
6. Put the tube to other box without the one way flap originally
Now give it a say a week for the bees to be used to going thru the new box to the hive. Once that is done, install the one-way flap.
7. Over time the bees will empty out of the crack to the box
8. Eventually the queen will also move in.
Should take two to three months with the last of the brood in the crack to hatch and move in.
Graham L Sanders
Hi Dorothy,
Grahams proposition is certainly interesting. I know a similar method is used for honey bees and I have even tried this with honey bees in the wall of a house. You can get workers in your new box but I never got the queen to shift house. With honey bees the queen can and does leave the nest when she swarms but in stingless bees the queen never leaves afte she is mated so I don’t know if she will walk out that entrance. Try with caution.
Graham, have you actually used this method? How do you know that your new nest that started was not just from a mated virgin queen? Did you try this with two boxes where you can watch what is going on?
Thanks
Dean
Firstly, yes I have done this two times and it works. One from a brick Bar-b-que, and one from a bar. Now that said, I haven’t sat there and watched what happens.
Your right there are two possibilities of what happens.
1. A virgin queen moves in, and the original queen stays and dies.
This assumes that the queen NEVER leaves the hive after mating. This would mean that in theory the queen could survive more than three months. as food reserves and care bees would sustain her. The original hive could sustain itself, as new comb could be continiuosly built, that’s the feed for the queen, and new offspring come available. This should be continiuous til the food runs out.
2. The queen moves to the new box.
In this one, the queen considers the box part of the original hive. This has been shown when one tries to “bud” a new hive off an existing hive or at least believed. The new hive gets a virgin queen, and you have to put a hole in the joining pipe, or carefully remove it, as the virgin queen is killed when the old queen realises the box has a rival queen.
My personal view is while the queen is yes quite stubborn to leave, its not a certainity. It happens if situations are right in both honey bees, and native bees, although in natives, I do wonder if she can fly with the egg swollen abdomine. Crawl she definitely can, and I believe with no hard evidence, is she treats the box as part of her hive and moves in.
Either way, its the way to relocate them IF you don’t want to dig them out.
Graham .
A couple of notes on stingless queens…
The egg swollen stingless queen can not fly. The queens in stingless bees do not battle to the death, rather the workers select which queen shall die and proceed to chop her up and throw her on the garbage pile.
This is in contrast to honey bees where the old queen leaves with a swarm to start a new home & In honey bees where the first queen to hatch quietly sneaks around murdering her yet to hatch queen sisters.
so what type of box do you use as a hive?
For myself I use a typical OATH design. Look at the article ” Surviving Heat And Drought”. https://www.australiannativebee.com/2016/04/13/773surviving-the-heat-and-drought/
I am about to trial a brand new design, and should have results in 6 months, so if successful I will report on this
Graham
Hi Nick,
When will you have native bees for sale again and hives also.
Thanks
Roy
I have native bees in my Telstra box, the Telstra guy gutted the hive to repair the phone line. I have rescued as much and as many bees
as possible and placed some in a foam vegetable box with lid, others I placed in a metal bird feeder,and another lot in a small wooden
box with perspex front. I moved parts of the hive, there is a fair bit of honey so a lot of the material is sticky. Do i need to remove any of the
bits of hive or just leave it and let them bees work it out. They seem to be working and flying in and out of the shelters. Many have died due
to honey stuck over them and of course the shovel!! They are all within a few meters from the original hive. I have noticed that bees are
entering the Telstra box again. I will make some OATH boxes for them but in the interim have I done the right thing?
Hi
I can understand the panick with this all happening at once. Yep, grab any ol thing and use it. So what to do now.
Yes you have done the right thing. Its either that or they just die. At present leave well enough alone. Bees will be mopping up the honey. Having a second dig will only cause more damage. Go and make some decent boxes. If you make one box, then look for the strongest box and just move the brood and pollen, avoid the honey. If you make more than one box, well then transfer all the colonies that survive. (I am willing to bet that maybe some transfers are just honey/pollen and no brood at all)
Bottom line – let the bees settle down, see what are the hives that do survive, and what will not survive, build your box(es) and transfer the bees in say two weeks when all the mess is fixed, and you can see clearly.
Graham
Hi Karin,
Although I do not recommend doing transfers in the middle of winter, sometimes life forces you to do a rescue.
My very best advice is only transfer brood and bees. All those bits of broken honey just drown bees and attract pests. Get rid of that sticky mess it is more trouble than its worth.
When I need an emergency box I use a styrofoam box, similar in size to a six pack cooler but with thicker walls. A medical supply box. Bees are happy in a foam box and I’ve kept them there for a year.
Foam box.
Get rid of the honey.
Just transfer brood.
Good luck.
Dean
Thanx Dean
A friend has made me an OATH, so yesterday we transferred the bees from the temporary accommodation of the polystyrene box. I didn’t
know about the honey stuff, so have just gone and removed most of it..some of the bees seemed happy walking around in the old broken up
hive so have left some in. Am hoping that they soon will figure out how to go in and out of their lovely new box.
I have 1 hive of TH stingless bees. The hive they are in was made roughly by a guy up here in cq and is a lot bigger than the standard hive. I want to split the hive as it’s doubled but can’t get any more of that size bee box due to that man moving away. I have since purchased 2 of the standard boxes to do a complete transfer & a split. I know how to move the bottom half into another box but I’m uncertain how to place the top part of the original box into a split of a second box. Do I just turn the brood upside down and place into the bottom of the second new box? Or do I just do one complete transfer, wait 6 mths then do a split into the second box? Please let me know the best method.
What I would do is to open your two halves as carefully as you can. Take some resin that is “clean” free from pollen or honey. Work that with heat till nice and soft. Place that around the inside and out of your new hive and reduce the hole so it’s only about 1 bee space to fit through. Then take half your brood, if you can mix the ages of brood (advancing and old) place that on some sticks or wax so it’s lifted off the base of you new hive. Next close up your old hive and wipe any honey or residue off it, tape joins if nessisary. Move that box to a new location in your yard (more then 2meters away from old position) and place your new hive in its spot. Hope this helps. Kind regards Nick
I was ready the above re moving a nest of native bees via the tube method. How do you make a one way. Bee flap?
I have been given a nest that is inside a bessr brick but want to move it into a purpose built OATH hive, how do i go about doing this? Can anyone help me out?
I have been given an active hive from a friend, however it is in a Besser block. I want to set it up in a purpose built OATH hive, how do I go about moving the nest into the new hive?
The native bees at our place are setting up a new colony, however many of them are dying. They have chosen to nest under a tiled verandah which may have been treated for white ants in the past. Could this be why they are dying?
Liz
Yes this is a very viable posibilty. One way to check is place an old white towel near their entrance and count the bees that are dead on it each day. If the colony is established you should have 15-30 dead bees that die of natural causes. Hope this helps. Kind regards Nick
My daughter moved into a new house and there appear to be Australian native bees swaming on a couple of wooded clothes pegs on the clothesline. I believe thsy don’t sting but how can we move these unwanted uests along. Wearing a pair or garden gloves, i was going to remove the said pegs to some other part of the yard.
Advice would be welcome. john.hallahan@gmail.com
My daughter moved into a new house and there appear to be Australian native bees swaming on a couple of wooded clothes pegs on the clothesline. I believe thsy don’t sting but how can we move these unwanted uests along. Wearing a pair or garden gloves, i was going to remove the said pegs to some other part of the yard.
Advice would be welcome.
Are these bees nesting in the pegs?
Yes, the bees do appear to be nesting in a couple of pegs on the line,
Ah these would be solitary native bees. They obviously like the area they have chosen. Is there a chance you can do away with the timber pegs and go to plastic? Timber ones can be moved to a new area close by but out of your way. ?