How Should You Position Your Beehives on a Stand?

Today I'm talking about hive stand configurations, which one is best and which one is for you. I'm in a beautiful apiary today in Gozo, and I've got 2 very different hive stand configurations to show you and talk to you about why you might use those in your own apiary. As always with beekeeping, there's no right or wrong answer. You just do what is best for you. It's the same with having the hives the warm way or the cold way if you're in the UK and using Nationals. The bees really aren't that fussed. But setting your hive up in different ways can potentially be good for you as a beekeeper, and you can get the bees to stop doing things that you might not want them to do. So the biggest risk that you're going to get with different hive stand configurations is drift from colony to colony. So if you take a look at this configuration here, it's just 4 hives all next to each other on a stand. This configuration is really good for you if you would like to work the bees from behind. Super simple. You just take off the roof, work your bees, move along to the next one, take the roof off, work your bees. It's very, very simple and easy to set up. Also, this is really good if you've just got like a narrow strip of land and you basically only got access to the front, which is the kind of access that you'll get in a lot of fields if you're pollinating the farmer's crops. He might just give you a really little strip like that. This is a good system. The problem with this system though, especially where I see it, where it's set up en masse, I see some people setting up 200 colonies like this all next to each other, the problem that you get is you get a lot of drift. The worker bees in the colony will drift and the drones will drift as well. So you might find that you kind of open up the first colony and there's not that many bees in it, and then there's a few more bees in the one next door, and then you come into like the third or the fourth one and all the bees are clustered up. So you will get drift. This configuration here, I really like here because it's good for talking to the camera, and it means that no matter which hive I'm working on, I can get a good angle to talk to people on YouTube. But the configuration that I've got over there that I'll switch to now is definitely a better configuration for your bees, and it really does help reduce drift. But the biggest benefit that this configuration has that this configuration does not have is that if you are mating queens in these boxes, let's say for example this box here has got a virgin queen superseded or something, it's gone out, gone out to mate, it'd come back and it goes into this hive. They will kill her. So this setup here, really not good for queen mating. Whereas this configuration here is a standard 4-way pallet configuration. So imagine you've got a pallet that's a meter by a meter and you're putting your 4 hives on it, and then each of the entrances faces off in a completely different direction. So 4 entrances, one facing north, one facing west, one facing south, one facing east. And it still allows the beekeeper to work very naturally. So if you're working on nationals, it's great because you can just turn the boxes round, warm way or cold way. So if I was running this as a national box, I would run it the cold way, which means the frames are perpendicular to the entrance. And then I could just pick up the frames like this. And then I move on to the next one, which is round here, and I pick up the frames like this. And what's really nice about this configuration here is that wherever you stand as the beekeeper, you're never blocking an entrance. But I would say the biggest benefit with that setup there is that if you're mating queens or you're allowing your queens to swarm and supersede or whatever they want to do, any sort of queen mating is much better on a 4-way hive setup like that with their entrances facing the other way. Means the virgin queens, after they've mated, will come back much easier for them to find their entrances. And also means that you'll really reduce the drift between those colonies and they should remain way more balanced. Now there's loads of other different configurations in there. What some people like to do is just have a single hive stand facing off in one direction and then another hive stand facing off in another direction, just with a single hive on. The more distance that you can put between your beehives, the better. It's also better for the bees in terms of reducing drift and getting more successful mated flights. What's your favorite hive stand configuration? Stick it in the comments and let me know.