In the enthusiasm of the moment, you may agree, forgetting that you’ll need to carry heavy, filled honey boxes a hundred steps back to your vehicle. Unfortunately, the only place they’ll let you set the hive is on the far side of a deep muddy ditch. You may find a willing landowner in that area. You may find an area where you’d like to set a hive or two. You might be adding an extra hour to your beekeeping for each out yard, especially if you have to drive home to get something you forgot (or didn’t expect to need). Convenience: You will look at your backyard hives more frequently than those kept anywhere that requires a hop in a vehicle and a supply checklist (smoker, veil, feed, equipment, swarm box, super).Perhaps a single extra yard can be justified for small holders – it might be needed for splits or queen rearing, though even that can be managed in one spot with appropriate techniques.Ĭoncerns hobby beekeepers should have include these issues: We occasionally meet beekeepers with ten hives and six bee yards or something like that. But what does it cost to keep extra bee yards going? If you have three hives, should you have three apiaries? I think not. Sometimes to make life easier in the bee yard – smaller apiaries make happier bees and happier beekeepers. Sometimes you move hives for pollination. I understand why a beekeeper has outyards. I was neither an especially good nor fast beekeeper. I was never chased out of any bee yard, but I would speed up my chores or skip some hives if the bees were getting out of hand, then come back another day. For one person working alone, smaller yards are better because work can usually be finished before robbing or extremely defensive behaviour erupts. But forage has changed and smaller apiaries (twenty hives each) began to perform better. Some New York and Pennsylvania beekeepers did that, way back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We could have kept 300 hives in one spot. Part of a 200-hive bee yard in Pennsylvania, 1906. When I started driving, I usually worked a cluster of three or four yards that were close to each other, to save travel time and gasoline money. So, I couldn’t actually manage his hives until I was sixteen and could drive a truck on the rural roads. ![]() Because of robbing concerns, none of the hives were on the farm where we had our extracting shop. Those 300 hives were in fifteen locations. ![]() My older brothers had taken over the other hives and other states. ![]() Even with our ridiculously high prices, gasoline is cheaper now than when he was getting started – and vehicles get better mileage.īy the time I had a drivers’ license, my father had just 300 hives in Pennsylvania. Three pounds of honey to buy one gallon of gas. Gasoline cost him $0.30/ gallon his honey sold for $0.10/ pound. But his business was centred in western Pennsylvania where he also had thirty locations close to home. My father, an early migratory beekeeper, had about 800 hives and trucked them into apple pollination in West Virginia, winter locations in South Carolina and Florida, and clover patches in Wisconsin. With fuel prices going scary high, I thought that a few comments on bee yards away from the home fortress might be timely. Our neighbourhood gasoline prices in April 2020, left (58.9 cents/litre) and April 2022, right (167.9 cents/litre)
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