A New Apiary Site
New Apiary Site
Hopefully, if our bees survive the next month or so, they’ll expand rapidly in number and we’ll end up with more colonies than we started with. Our plan this year is to ‘make increase’ by performing artificial swarms and re-housing the swarms in new hives.
Our garden isn’t big enough for too many hives and not really an ideal setting anyway, but we have a new location that we’ll be setting up another apiary in. It looks ideal and the bees will be in heaven there. It’s on a slope that faces SE but is protected on all four sides by mature trees. There are plenty of fruit trees in the area and it is surrounded by woodland, huge areas of brambles, and even has a few ponds nearby. The bees shouldn’t be disturbed and they shouldn’t bother anyone either, and we can come and go as we please in order to manage them. They aren’t even far from the river so will be able to get the to Himalayan Balsam at the end of summer as well.
The only problem is that one of the hives that we want to move there is currently in another ‘out apiary’ at a friends house which is only about 1.8 miles from the new location. The plan therefore is to move that hive back to our house for a few weeks before setting it up on the new site.
It should be an exciting year for the bees and for us as beekeepers.
