How Many Hives is Too Many?

Navigating this can be tricky for a beekeeper. A land’s carrying capacity for beehives depends on many factors. Here are some answers to questions I get asked about almost weekly, especially by those who are new to navigating the land-use priorities of a rural community. Tom & I have lived year-round in the Ferncroft-Sandwich area for 24 years, the last four on this pretty little farm we bought realizing we needed more land to support my living as a beekeeper. After a two-year search, it ticked off most all the boxes for the bees.

How many colonies of bees are in a hive?

• A colony of honey bees is a family with a Queen Mother, and her daughters, who raise and care for each other and the Queen’s sons. Where’s Dad? Well, let’s just say a bee colony is a woman’s world.
• Commercial beekeepers may stack one box per family of bees on top of each other on a truck for transport to pollinate a crop; but those families of bees only have food during the crop’s bloom period so need to be moved afterward to survive.
• That is not how honey bee colonies on a farm are normally managed in our rural setting.
• One stationary beehive on a bee farm normally consists of several boxes stacked on top of each other that house one family of bees, but unlike commercial hives, also house one colony’s food.
• So if you see six separate stacks of several boxes on a bee farm, you are usually seeing six families of bees: Six Queens, their daughters, their sons, and their food. Sorry, Dads…

Land carrying capacity:

• A sustainable bee farm in our climate needs “forage” or flowers blooming from early spring to late fall that provide nectar & pollen. Bees make nectar into honey as their primary food, and pollen is made into “bee baby food”. A variety of nectars and pollens are essential for healthy bees. Gardeners make great beekeepers but the keen beekeeper either teams up with a gardener or quickly learns those skills.
• A bee’s consumption of honey to support its flight to collect food for the family breaks even at the 2-mile mark. Our non-competitive friends also practice a type of apiary fidelity: if two groups of hives are placed a mile apart the bees will normally only search for food up to a half mile in each other’s direction. It is in their nature as social insects, hard wired to cooperate, to also defer to other pollinators in a polite sort of “excuse me” dance. Of course, bees don't read the same books we do so behaviors will vary.
• For these reasons a bee farm should keep its bee families rich in food sources as close to the hives as possible. No mow May is just “no mow” or “strategically mowed” because wildflowers like mustards, clovers, dandelion, and prunella are extremely valuable background sources of pollen and nectar in-between major bloom events.

Seasonal Concerns

• Going into winter a colony is usually in a stack of about three boxes per colony on one hive stand.
• A colony in our climate might be confined for up to six months in the barren landscape of winter or too-cold-to-fly weather, consuming 10 lbs of honey on average per month to survive it.
• Pussy Willows are very valuable sources of food for bees in early spring. Let them bloom!
• Then, especially in our climate and terrain, the many varieties of deciduous trees come into bloom, along with the brambles, providing nutritious forage all summer long.
• Goldenrod, Asters, & Knotweed are extremely valuable sources of nectar and pollen in the fall.
• If weather and forage and colony population all align in a perfect storm of cooperation, a family of bees in our very brief forage season can modestly store enough honey to get through the winter plus some for the beekeeper.
• A sustainable bee farm leaves 60 to 100 lbs of honey for a colony of bees and still might lose 10% to 50% or more of their colonies depending on beekeeper experience, winter conditions, nutritional value of bee forage, disease, rainfall, chemical contaminants from garden and agricultural practices, predators, and many more human and environmental challenges.

How many hives is too many? To be sustainable up here a beekeeper will monitor and adjust the number of hives the bee farm can feed consistently over many seasons and over many years that exhibit varying climate conditions. The bee farm will also need to maintain a responsible replacement plan for colonies that fail, ideally by splitting those that survive.

 
Yes, it is hard work…for the bees and for the beekeeper, but the northeast has served them both well for hundreds of years as a refuge from the land limitations of more urban settings, as well as the industrial agriculture challenges of southern states. And the honey, in my humble opinion, is some of the best and purest in the world.

Athena Contus ~ Athena’s Bees
Carroll County Adult Education
Cornell University Certified Master Beekeeper
University of Montana Certified Master Beekeeper