Moving Bees and Chickens

How hard can it be to move a hive a few feet across the yard?

Harder than one might think. If you move bees more than three miles, you can put them wherever you want. If you move them less than three miles, you can't move them more than a few feet a day, or they can't find their hive again.

As we move into some new projects in the yard, it has become necessary to move the hive. In order to move their heavy selves a few feet a day, the bees have been relocated to a cart so that they can inch their way from location A to location B.

Patience and equipment.


Oddly, chickens are also a pain to move. Past experience has shown that if we carry the little coop from the yard to the garden, the chickens will dance along merrily behind us, go in the coop and eat a snack, and then at bedtime return to the original location and circle in increasing panic because they can't find their bed.

Having had to catch the chickens after past moves, the people have gotten smarter. Someone needed to. We now move the coop and then throw snacks in there close to bedtime. When the chickens go after the snack, we slam the door shut before they can wander off in search of the "lost" coop.