Setting Up An Apiary? Start HERE

In this video, I'm going to give you all of my top tips for setting up an out apiary. An out apiary is an apiary that's not at your home or business location. It's on somebody else's land. Now, I've had loads of out apiaries, some that are really good, some that are really bad. I've set some up the right way, I've set some up the wrong way. I've never annoyed anyone, but I have moved apiaries around and I've closed a lot of them. And I've got to a point now where I think I'm in a pretty good position to give you some advice, some tips, some tricks, and some things not to miss. So let's jump straight into it. The first thing we're looking for, for Honey in and out apiary is good forage. There's no point bringing all of your bees into an apiary, into a site, if they're not going to collect you any honey. You might as well just not do it to start off. So I'm looking for mature woodland, really good in North Wales, good arable crops, borage, oilseed rape, beans. I'm looking for the right type of soil, and I'm looking for a relatively high water table. Now you can go away, you can find out all of that information, and the reason I say that is because we're moving more and more into like drought conditions now in the summer. And if you find an area that's got the right kind of soil, a little bit of clay in it, it's going to retain that moisture with a relatively high water table, maybe with a watercourse within a mile, mile and a half away, and mature trees that are going to go down and tap that water, you're going to have a really good sustainable source of nectar. So first thing I look for is good forage. And what I would say as well is that once you've found a place that you think's got good forage, you need to try that out for 2 or 3 years. Don't be afraid to say that this apiary is not performing, I'm going to cut my losses here and I'm going to somewhere else. That's how you find the really brilliant apiaries, is that you keep on moving, you keep on evolving, and you iteratively improve the apiary step by step. Now, when I'm setting up my out apiaries, I have a number of red lines, areas that I will not compromise on. Doesn't matter if everything else is perfect. If I don't get my red lines, I don't set up an apiary there. One of those red lines for me is vehicle access. If I can't get my pickup truck to within 10, 15 meters of that apiary at Every single point throughout the year, whether it's baking hot in the summer, freezing cold in the winter, or for the other 340 days of the year in Wales, soggy and damp, then I'm not setting up an apiary in that spot. It might be perfect in every other way, but believe me, when you come to go and do something in the winter or in the autumn and you want to feed or add some fondant or do something, and you're ferrying these boxes across 100 meters of soggy field, you will not be happy with that at all, and you'll wish that you sited it closer to good vehicle access. So this leads me nicely onto the next Which is use Google Earth to your advantage. You might be thinking, well, how do I know if there's good vehicle access? Use Google Earth, look at where the tracks are in the field, look at where the roads are, look at where the paths are, look at where the watercourses are. Use Google Earth to determine where you want to site your bees. And when you're determining that, be very, very specific. Stick an X on the map, print it out, and then you're going to go to the landowner and you're going to say to them, I want to keep bees here, and give them the reasons why you want to keep bees there. If you do this the other way around and you just go to the landowner and say, hey, can I keep some bees on your land? They generally say yes, but they will almost certainly give you the worst part of their land. They'll give you the boggy bit, they'll give you the bit where it's really difficult to get to, they're going to park you somewhere that's quite difficult. And once you get into that negotiation and that conversation with them, it's quite difficult to say, oh, actually, can I go over there? Because they've already been quite kind in offering you land. If you print it off on a piece of paper, put a cross on it, approach the landowner and say, I would like to keep bees on your land in this location for this reason, they're much more So that takes me on to approaching the landowner. Again, Google is your friend here. You can generally find it from Google who owns that actual piece of land, but don't be afraid to go and knock on people's doors. Go up to the farmyard, go up to the business unit, and say to them, I would like to keep bees on your land. But when you go there, make sure you follow these tips. Put on your bee suit, nice clean bee suit, and go armed with a jar of honey. It's the best tactic ever. Shows them that you're serious, shows them that you're experienced because you've got a jar of honey already, and there is no better bribe than a sweet jar of honey. But before you go and approach that landowner, there's a few more things that you need to look out for, so let's get on with the rest of those now. Now when I started setting up our apiaries, I kind of thought, well, I want to make this as easy as possible for me as it can be. So instead of having 10 apiaries with 6 hives in each, I'm going to have 6 apiaries with 10 hives in each. And I took that way too far as well. So some of my apiaries had 20 or 30 hives in there, and I really didn't get very good results doing that. And this is completely dependent on the forage in your area, but also the hive densities in that area as well. So you do need to chop and change, be a little bit iterative with this. My suggestion though, and my advice, is to start off lower and build the colony numbers up if the colonies are performing well. Don't just blindly go and put 20 colonies onto a site for a whole season and then think, oh, they didn't do very well there. You might as well just put 6 on that site, dot it around a little bit, spread your bets, and then work out what is the best performing apiary, and then incrementally increase the numbers. So this one's really important, and again, this is another one of my red lines: livestock protection. Whether that's cows, sheep, horses, or even wild animals like bears or deer, you need to have suitable protection in place so that those creatures, those animals, aren't coming in Really snooping around your hives, damaging them, trying to steal from them. You want to have good protection there. Now ideally, you're going to look for a place that already has that protection. Maybe there's a nice fence line or something that the farmer's already got in place. Try and utilize what's there to the best of your ability. If not, you're going to need to try and put something in or go somewhere where there's not going to be much livestock interfering with your hives. Another red line I've got is not siting your colonies near Big watercourses. So I'm not talking about a little stream here, but a big river, a proven floodplain. You will never ever find me putting my colonies near a proven floodplain. Doesn't matter if it ticks every other single box. I've seen beekeepers lose lots and lots of colonies when the water levels rise and they just sweep all of their beehives away. Not something for me. You can look it up on Google and you can find out the areas to avoid. Now the next 2 are slightly contradictory. So the first one is I like to keep my colonies in sunny and open areas. I find I have far less chalkbrood, much larger honey crops, and the bees just seem happier and healthier in full sunlight. But I'm also looking for the best possible wind protection that I can find. Bees do not like flying in windy weather. We get lots and lots of windy weather in North Wales. You want to protect them from the wind and give them as much sun as you possibly can. So ideally what you're looking for is like a hedge or a little bit of a cliff Facing south gives you protection from those northerly winds, and it gives you full sun throughout the whole of the day. Right, we're on to another red line, and that is proximity to other apiaries. If I go to a landowner and approach them and say, I want to keep bees here, and they say, yeah, sure, we've got another beekeeper here at the moment, you can bring your bees on as well, I immediately decline and say, thanks very much for the kind offer, but I don't want to interfere with that other beekeeper. Personally, I don't want to bring my bees in for a disease risk for him, and I don't want to inflict my bees to any disease risk that may already be on that site. That's only part of it. The main part of it is courtesy. If somebody's already got a site there, and I do this even if it's on somebody else's land, so maybe the adjacent farmer's land, if I can see the apiary, I steer well clear and I move my bees somewhere else. Now, I don't necessarily think this one's a red line, but it is something that I do look for, and it's something that I struggled with a little bit at the beginning. So it's hard to say no at the beginning. You go and find a landowner and they say, yeah, come on, bring your bees down, I've got a lovely little spot for you. And when they say a lovely little spot, they mean an absolutely tiny little spot, and it's just too small. And I've done it before and I thought, yeah, well, I can get bees in there, that'll be fine, and we'll make it work. And then it just becomes a real maintenance issue and you're in there strimming and trying to tidy it up all the time and you're getting tripping over brambles and there's just not enough space to move around. So for me, you'll see it here now, lots of space, lots of access for vehicles. You can move your hives and not keep them all next to each other, not like the ones in this apiary here. Get as much space as you possibly can. Now this question is asked a lot in terms of what agreements do you have with landowners, and we don't go into formal agreements with landowners. We don't get them to sign contracts, although if I was a professional bee farmer, I may kind of just set up a really simple contract to give me some terms of release from the apiary, maybe some notice periods, but I still think it'd be quite difficult to enforce that, and by the time you get to a point where you're trying to enforce it, it's going to be long gone and your bees are going to be gone. So all I would say is just try and build a relationship with that landowner. They're doing you the favor here. You're not really doing them the favor unless there's some sort of pollination agreement, and then you would need a formal agreement in place. But be kind to them, be courteous, do not leave the gates open. That is the number one way to get yourself kicked off an apiary. Give them lots of gifts, give them lots of honey, stop for a chat, talk to them about the bees, and generally just be a very courteous and Thankful apiary owner. You don't need to have a signed contract. Right, red line number 1. I know I said vehicles was number 1, but I forget this is definitely number 1, even ahead of vehicles. Keep your apiaries away from people. And I say that for 2 reasons: because you don't want anybody knowing where your apiary is, but number 2, and most importantly, you don't want people getting stung. If you're setting up an out apiary, even if it's only 2 or 3 colonies, You know what bees can get like if they get angry and they attack someone, and you've set it up near a public footpath, then there is going to be a bit of a nightmare to deal with there. For me, out of sight, out of mind, away from people makes it much better. So my next tip is once you've found somewhere suitable on Google Earth, you've gone and spoken to the landowner, see if he'll take you down there to go and actually have a look so you can verify the stuff that you've already seen on Google Earth. I've had this a couple of times where you find somewhere, it looks perfect on Google Earth, and you get down there and you realize, oh, this is not perfect at all, there's something wrong. There's maybe like a big really steep hill getting down to it that you can't get your vehicle down to, and you need to call the whole thing off. Be prepared at that point to walk away. Don't settle for second best. If the site isn't suitable, you're much better off leaving it and trying to find another one. Now I mentioned this one before, but it's really important, so I will double down on it, but that is Respect the apiary. So we've spoken about closing gates, being courteous to the landowner, but don't leave your litter around, don't have fires in the middle of the day, don't do anything other than tending your bees at the site unless you have a prior agreement. Really, really easy way to get yourself kicked off a site is by leaving litter around or leaving it in a mess. Show the utmost respect, treat it as your back garden, and the landowners will thank you in the long term. So there you go, they're my top tips. I hope you go out there, find really, really good apiaries, and remember, always stick to your red lines and keep on improving the apiary. By dumping the rubbish ones and moving to the better ones.