What About Bees On A Smallholding? Designing The Apiary

Claire Waring considers how to arrange your hives

- Claire Waring

Having considered what sort of bees you want to keep, where you will locate them and which type of hive you plan to use, the last question in the apiary is how are you going to arrange them and on what? For the beekeeper with OCD, nice straight lines must be preferred but this is not the best way. Placing hives directly on the ground is not the best thing either. With wooden hives, the damp promotes rot and inspecting a colony at ground level is extremely uncomfortable.

Many beekeepers develop ‘beekeepers back’ – either through lifting heavy hives incorrectly or by constant bending while inspecting their colonies. The answer to the former is to lift with your knees not your back, use a hive barrow or get a fellow beekeeper to give you a hand. You can use a wheelbarrow to transport boxes but most of these are not wide enough for the box to sit stably in the bottom. Hive barrows are designed to clamp around the box, making it much less likely that anything will fall off. For more than one box in either situation, you will need to strap them together tightly. String is not  recommended! Tensioning hive straps are available from suppliers.