We decided that the care and feeding of the hives in our out-yard might be made easier in the snowy/winter months if we moved them back home to where we could get to them easier.

Our weekend was booked, so instead of screening the hive entrances on Friday night and moving the hives Saturday morning, we did the entire move Friday night after dusk.

It was somewhere around 7:30pm when we started, and by then it was dark enough a flashlight was required to see.

This summer I found out that my bees really dislike the bright light from a LED flashlight, so we thought we might try red LED

As it turns out, we were over-prepared. The temperatures were in the low 50s and the bees were clustered inside the hive, and they didn't bother to come out and investigate when we slipped paper-towels into their entrance reducers.

Each hive had a screen bottom board, so there was no concern over their ventilation or heat from being blocked in. Besides they were only going for a short trip back home.

Before we moved them from their stands onto the trailer we used wood joiners to secure each hive body to the next body. This way they would hold together and not topple apart while being moved.

With each hive stapled together, we used moving straps to wrap around the sides of each hive, from top to bottom and cinched it down tight. You can see the ratchet mechanism of each strap on top of each outer cover below.

With the 3 hives onto the trailer, we added a few more moving straps to hold them into place and set off back to the house.

Once we were there we moved the hives from the trailer to their stands and removed the paper towels.

Either it was too cold for them to move, or they didn't mind being moved because we never saw a single bee escape to check out what was going on.