Placing A Hive and How Many
Richard Wahl
Siting a Hive: Hive placement can be one of the first critical considerations if you are someone thinking about getting into bee management or becoming a new beekeeper. During my dozen years of bee management I have learned a few things about hive configurations and placement. The most often seen arrangement of a group of hives is in a straight row with all facing the same direction perhaps a few feet apart from each other.
This stems from the human perception that neatly organized arrangements in a military style straight alignment best serve the needs of the beekeeper. Research has shown that bees do not think this way. Common practice is to align those hives with the bottom entrance facing either east or south. There is good reason for the easterly or southerly facing alignment, but not so much for a straight row military alignment. If you ever watch bees on the side of a frame doing their flower location dance, research has shown one of their directional reference sources to be the sun. The number of degrees off a vertical axis for the waggle dance provides a directional clue while the duration of the waggle provides a distance clue to other bees. As soon as the sun rises and temperatures are sufficient for forager bees to venture out, these waggle dances begin as foragers find new sources of nectar.
Having the earliest possible exposure to the rising sunlight became glaringly important as I assisted a new beekeeper with a problem a few years ago. In his first year he had purchased a package of bees and installed them in a new hive near the rear of his property lot. Things seemed to be going well for this new hive, as on occasion through late Spring and Summer, he reported the hive doing well with a queen laying, comb being built and nice brood patterns. Then one day he called and asked if I could come to look at his hive as he thought his bees were gone. I had not seen his hive location or bees before this since all seemed to be going well for him. Upon my arrival and a quick check of his hive it was indeed apparent that he had but a few dozen bees still hanging around the hive. He explained it had been a booming deep to which he had recently added a second deep to provide more space. Since there were no indications of critters, pests or disease in the hive I could only conclude that his bees had absconded most likely due to the hive location. His hive sat against a row of twenty to thirty foot tall pine trees on the east edge of his property with their bottom entrance to the west. In that position the hive was shaded until shortly after lunch. Bees taking waggle dance clues from returning forager bees would not have the sun to use for orientation until well after noon. It would seem that this was enough of a deterrent to first time forager bees that the entire hive decided to abscond and find a better location from which sunlight orientation could be used much earlier. The following year he moved his hive location to an open area in the middle of his property where the sun reached the hive early in the morning and he had much better luck.
Getting back to the straight line placement, bees have a tendency to drift from one hive to another. Research has shown that if a bee from a nearby hive returns to a hive other than its own loaded with pollen or nectar (and possibly mites) it will be allowed to enter the foreign hive. I was rather perplexed one Winter when one of my hives seemed to be continually increasing in bee population throughout the Winter while the hive a few feet away was decreasing.
As it came time for Spring inspection it became clear that sometime in early Winter the decreasing hive had lost its queen. My guess is that as bees left that hive on cleansing flights they were returning to the sister queenright hive next to it. It is the only plausible explanation I can come to as a result of the continuous decrease in one hive and the enormous increase in the hive right next door through the cold Michigan Einter. So in order to decrease the potential for drift of bees between hives a better practice is to place the hives with their openings at different angles. It would seem as long as a hive gets the early morning sun, a hive opening on the north or west does not impede the bee’s ability to orient. I have had several hives set with entrances to the north or west and they seem as productive as the others open to the east or south. All my hives are bathed in early morning sunlight regardless of the bottom entrance direction.
A common hive management practice that is becoming less adhered to is to have all hives painted in white. I have found that a difference in hive colors or different designs on hives helps bees find their way back to their own starting point. Again I have found research that shows bees to be most attuned to the colors of yellow, blue and purple in that order. I have repainted some of my hives in these colors and it seems to make a difference in bees finding their own hives. A strong indicator of this is mite migration after a swarm catch. For some reason my swarms seem to come with heavier mite loads than those that exist in my own overwintered hives. Anecdotal evidence seems to suggest that when all hives were white ,the mite loads in adjacent hives increased much more than when the adjacent hives were of different colors.
Another consideration that one often hears from experienced beekeepers is to start with two hives if one can afford it. The rationale for this is that the two can be compared to each other and any noticed differences can be explored. It might be easier to catch a problem with one or the other at an earlier time. Also, with two hives present, the loss of a queen in one does not require the purchase of a new package. A frame of brood and eggs from the queenright hive can be moved to the queenless hive and the bees will normally select a few cells to make a new queen. It will slow the production of the previously queenless hive down since it will take a new queen sixteen days to hatch and another ten days to two weeks to mate before she is laying eggs, but at least the beekeeper still has two hives. Another trick when buying a package of bees is to buy a spare queen at the same time. Dump half the bee package in one hive with one of the queens inserted and place the other half in a second hive with the other queen. Again, the build-up of the hive will be slower due to a smaller number of bees in each hive, but it does provide an additional hive at the cost of one additional queen. I have had a beekeeper friend successfully split a package three ways, purchasing two extra queens to start three new hives. Of course the sooner this is done in late Spring or early Summer, the longer the bees have to build up stores for the Winter and it is unlikely much honey, if any can be taken from secondary or tertiary split packages the first year.
A feature that seems to hold true in SE Michigan is that the number of hives in a single location should be limited to nine or ten. With only one or two hives I can expect to put four or five honey supers over two, ten frame deeps. With nine to ten hives I rarely get more than two honey supers on a hive and if a third is added it usually goes into Winter storage with very little capped, harvestable honey since the bees from more hives are competing for the same area’s nectar.
One last way to increase honey production in the first year is to set two hives next to each other with queen excluders over each and a single set of honey supers set halfway over each. In this manner there are two hives of bees working one set of honey supers. I have had success with both bottom entrances open to the same side but it seems most would recommend that entrances be on opposite sides. This is probably a good idea with queens from different sources. In my case, the queens were raised from my own hives and were sisters to each other which might be a factor assuming their pheromones were very similar to each other. In one instance, I had a third queen start laying in the honey supers above the queen excluders. I soon moved her to a separate hive.
