Two apiaries, one season, and the difference nobody records
Most beekeepers can tell you which apiary is their best. Very few can say by how much, or why. The answer decides where hives go next spring, and it only exists if a season of records is tied to the site.
Ask a beekeeper which of their apiaries is the good one and the answer comes straight away. Ask by how much, and it becomes a shrug. The impression is real, built over years of lifting supers, but it is not a number, and it cannot be tested against a season that has not happened yet.
What a site is actually being judged on
A location is a combination of forage, shelter, water and how long it takes you to get there. Only the last of those is obvious. The rest show up indirectly: as a spring build-up that starts a fortnight earlier, as colonies that need feeding in August, as supers that fill in ten days one year and not at all the next.
- Forage is not one thing but a calendar. A site with a heavy spring flush and nothing in July produces a different season from one with steady summer forage, and the two need different management.
- Shelter shows up in the build-up date and in winter survival. Hives in a wind tunnel start later and lose more.
- Water shows up in temper and in the feed bill: bees that fly a long way for water bring back less nectar.
- Distance shows up in the number of visits, and every reading in the records is a visit that happened.
None of that is visible on a single inspection. It is visible across a season of inspections, per site, set next to each other.
The six readings that compare sites
Take two apiaries with similar colonies and the same management, and over one season these six figures will tell you which site is better and by how much:
- Build-up date: the visit at which population and closed brood start climbing in spring.
- Frames of stores in late summer: the reading that decides whether feeding is needed at all.
- Feed per hive: kilos of sugar the site cost you.
- Harvest per hive: what came off, weighed per hive rather than per truck.
- Losses and requeens: the colonies that did not make it, or needed help to.
- Visits: how many times you went, which is the cost of distance made visible.
Comparing fairly
The comparison is only worth anything if the site is the variable. Put colonies of similar strength and similar queens at each site, manage them the same way, and give it a whole season; a spring comparison flatters the sheltered site, a summer one flatters the site with late forage. Two years is better than one, because forage years differ.
Then the difference is a figure. This site produced more honey on less feed; that one took three extra visits to keep alive. Weather and forage are the same for both if they are within a few kilometres of each other, so what is left is the site.
Recording the site, not just the hive
Every apiary in BeehiveMind has coordinates and its own weather, and every record, inspection, feeding, harvest and cost, belongs to a hive, which belongs to a site. That is the whole mechanism. Once a season of records exists the comparison is arithmetic rather than memory, and the cost per hive by apiary is the same records divided one more time.
When the records say move
The decision it changes is not a small one. Moving hives is a day of work and a real risk to the colonies. It is worth doing on evidence, and worth not doing on a hunch. The evidence looks like this: over two seasons, one site returned half the honey on the same feed, or needed feeding every August while the other did not, or lost twice the colonies over winter. When the numbers say that, the hives go in the trailer in early spring or after the last harvest, and the site that was only ever a hunch becomes a fact you can plan the next season on.
Common questions
What makes a good apiary site?
Forage within about three kilometres through the whole season, not just a spring flush; shelter from prevailing wind with morning sun on the entrances; water within a few hundred metres; dry ground and air that does not pool cold; and access you can manage with a full super in your arms. Distance from your door matters more than beekeepers admit, because a site that costs an hour each way gets visited less and the records show it.
How far apart should apiaries be?
Far enough that they draw on different forage: three to five kilometres is a common rule of thumb, since bees forage mostly within two to three kilometres of the hive. Closer than that, two sites are effectively one for the purposes of comparison, and both will suffer in a dearth together.
How many hives can one site support?
It depends entirely on the forage, which is why the question is answered by records rather than rules. A site where the per-hive harvest falls as you add hives has reached its limit; one where twenty hives each do as well as ten did has not. Many temperate sites comfortably carry ten to twenty colonies; rich agricultural forage can carry far more for a few weeks and far fewer for the rest of the year.
Apiaries and beehives in BeehiveMind »
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