Siting and Moving hives

Moving hives

Describe what precautions should be taken to prevent honeybees from being a nuisance to neighbours and livestock. Give an elementary description of how to set up an apiary.

Siting an Apiary

An apiary must have five or more hives to survive Asian hornet attacks. Consequently, many beekeepers will have to share apiaries. I’ll ignore that reality.

A queen bee does three things: lays eggs, swarms and dies. If she fails and the colony lacks eggs, it is doomed. It’s not uncommon. If you don’t have a second colony, you will have to do some grovelling to get a frame of eggs or pay a small fortune for a queen, should one be available. So make sure you start with enough room for a second hive. There is a natural tendency for two hives to become 4 and 4 to become 8. So you will need plenty of space. If you want to store poly hives in a shed, don’t, although an empty garage would be okay. Every time a box bumps into something hard, it gets injured.

Home or out-apiary

If you have to drive to an out-apiary, your honey will have a considerable carbon footprint. But I suppose it is widely believed that a car is a necessary extension of one’s legs, so it follows that petrol is a form of food and food is essential for life.

The most fun place to keep bees is in your garden. But it must be suitable. If the hives are well tucked away and there is a good branch for swarms to hang off (particularly if you regularly wipe it with swarm lure wipes), you need not necessarily tell your hysterical neighbour.

Yes, that’s apocryphal. Bees can be defensive like a mastiff. Would you ask for permission before getting what turns out to be a jumping, escape artist, over-protective dog? In comparison, placid bees pose no risk. But they may decide to swarm into your neighbour’s garden, and your neighbours could find bees frightening.

Alternatively, win over your neighbours with promises of honey, but be circumspect; they may have diabetes, consider insects disgusting stinging things, or not wild about honey. You could use the “good for the world” card if extremely few apiaries are near your home. Explain swarming to your neighbours and that swarming bees are gentle bees (hopefully). Generally, forewarned is forearmed.

For example, if your neighbour is severely allergic to bee stings, you may have to explain that if they already have bees tending their flowers, they won’t get any more bees just because you keep them. But be circumspect. If your neighbour puffs up and dies, you won’t feel great. So it would be better to find another site.

Space: With two hives, they can sit side by side, their entrances facing opposite directions. Your apiary must have enough space to dissemble a hive into three piles. Enough space between hives equates to how much space you need to move around them comfortably. If you use British Standard hives, I recommend initially orienting them cold-way, so an experienced beekeeper can inspect them with you. The area surrounding your apiary will determine your lneed to exterminate less-than-perfect colonies. If your neighbours are close, you may wish to dispatch any colony with bees that follow you 2 metres after an inspection. If this is your criteria, you will kill plenty of colonies.

For example, my bees fly over a farmer’s track seven meters from my hives. My storage box is four meters or more from my hives. If the bees hound me after my inspections, so I cannot remove my suit, they complain too much. If I have a spare queen and requeening does not make an immediate difference, I destroy the cantankerous colony. I cannot wait and see. It’s not nice to kill a colony, but I cannot take risks. Usually, I can wander one foot away from my hives without wearing a suit, but despite this, on average, I have to dispatch a colony every year. Bees can be gentle until disturbed and subsequently prone to sting for the rest of the day.

Orientation

Wooden hives are best put in the shade to reduce the energy the bees must expend to control the internal milieux. Poly hives likewise, but both hive types seem to do okay in the sun. However, bees in wooden hives invariably beard in the 20s °C .Bees in poly hives may beard in the 30s °C, (I’ve only seen it once or twice).

However, you must ensure that you can hold a frame up to eye level where sunlight or bright light will shine on it from above or over your shoulder. Unless you pay attention to this, I assure you that you will not be able to inspect your bees properly; you will be unable to see eggs, just black holes. Subsequently, your colonies will swarm, and you will feel a failure.

Wooden hives warm up rapidly in the morning sun, so position their entrance facing Southeast so they get off to an early start. This sounds plausible, and research in an Arizonan climate is favourable. Poly hives don’t need the sun so much as they are warm inside.

If you don’t have much space, the entrance of each hive should face the opposite direction to the others to prevent drifting. This isn't easy if you, like me, get pleasure from comparing what each colony is doing at a single glance. Once you have a few hives, placing them in a horse-shoe or random pattern is a good idea.

Water

Bees need a water source within 100 metres, closer than your neighbour’s jacuzzi, swimming pool, bird bath, open water-butt, dripping garden tap, etc. If you provide a water supply, add a bit of peaty earth to provide minerals. The drinking area must be damp, but surprisingly not so wet or prone to floods that the bees drown.

Avoid the obvious: footpaths, roads, horses and other livestock, moles, badger routes, electricity pylons, arable crops treated with fungicides or pesticides, and intensive farming with no forage. That’s quite a tall call if you live in a corn belt.

Bees enjoy mini cruises on floating pieces of wood (so long as they have a good landing strip) and supplements like calcium and magnesium in the spring and autumn, which can be achieved by taking a dietary supplement and adding a little urine to their water. Once they are habituated to a water source, ensure it does not dry out.