bee yards

[mdunc]

Thanks for all the replies. I own 5 acres mostly wooded & my hives have never done real well here at the house. No crops or farmland until you get 3-5 miles away. I moved 5 hives to a friends farm about 5 miles away & they just went crazy this year (crazy good). This brings up another question....how many hives is to many in one yard? How do you know what the capacity is?

[brooksbeefarm]

Trail and error mostly on my part, but if it's farm country that's pasture land for cattle and they don't clean out there fence rows it can handle 15 to 20 hives, in my area anyway. In these places there is usually a woods for shade and of course a water source. Some of my best yards are in wooded areas with abandon farms that have been left to revert back to nature, but those are getting hard to find. Jack

[tbonekel]

I would say that if all of those hives did well, then you are not yet at the limit. I would put a couple more. I have three hives in my back yard that produced this year. One hive didn't produce very well. Don't know if I have hit the limit for my area or not. Most of the acreage around me is pasture/grazing land and not cultivated for any particular crop. There are some fields that were full of wildflowers.

[LazyBkpr]

My area is much like Jacks.
  Knowing the limit is a real pain, because the limit is different every year. Last year it stopped raining about mid June,and we did not get any substantial rain (more than a tenth) until September. It was a rough summer with quite a bit of feeding. They had plenty of pollen but very little nectar.  This year we have had an abundance of rain. I have 26 hives in my home yard and they are ALL packing in the nectar. I think I could probably have 35 to 40 hives here this year and be fine.
   I have three ponds within a couple hundred yards, and a creek about a 1/4 mile away. MOST of the land is tilled, but there are also pastures, draws, fence rows and crick bottom within very easy forage range. To the east is a large tract of timber (500+ acres) with locust, maple and many other hardwoods.  As long as we get the rain we need, I think I could manage about 30 hives per yard.

   I have also read somewhere in the past, that competition widens the area bees will forage. With one or two hives they typically forage within a mile, but as the competition grows they automatically extend that range.   Obviously I cant confirm that, but I will say I have been quite happy with the amount of honey being produced, despite having more hives than I like in one spot.

[Bamabww]

This brings up another question....how many hives is to many in one yard? How do you know what the capacity is?

A 87 year old beekeeper, now deceased, told me the reason he switched from medium supers to shallow supers was not the weight but the frames weren't being filled out in the medium. He switched his 5 hives over to all shallow supers and he said they filled out all 10 frames each year after that.  I don't know if the amount of honey would have been more on the medium supers even though they weren't all fill out as compared to  the shallows so this may not be a valid test. But he was convinced that was all his territory and bees would yield.

[Papakeith]

I guess it depends on what you consider a "yard".  Is there a distance requirement?

Right now I have three areas separated by about 300 yards.  All are either on my property or my Father's. 



Next year I'll probably try to move a few colonies off to different areas.  I've got two volunteers so far.