🐝 Siting and Setting Up an Apiary

A hive does not make honey. Forage makes honey, and the hive is only a container that holds it. So the first question about any site is not whether there is room for hives. It is how much flowering plant material lies within flying distance, and how many other bees are already drinking from it.

The sourced flying distances agree well enough to plan on. Kenyan extension practice says bees forage in a radius of 3 km from the apiary. A US extension source says bees prefer to forage within a 2 mile radius but can travel up to 5 miles if necessary. Another says bees are known to travel up to 2 miles or more for food, but at high energy cost. Put together: plan on roughly 2 to 3 km of useful forage, knowing the bees can go further but that every extra kilometre they fly is honey they burn instead of storing.

Now do the arithmetic that most beekeepers never do.

1. Take the Kenyan 3 km radius.
2. Area of a circle is pi times radius squared. 3 squared is 9. 9 times 3.14 is about 28.
3. So a 3 km radius encloses about 28 square kilometres.
4. One square kilometre is 100 hectares, so that is about 2,800 hectares.

Every hive in that circle draws on the same 2,800 hectares. Yours, your neighbour's, and every feral colony in every hollow tree and roof space. That single calculation is the whole argument for limiting how many colonies you put on one site, and it is why an apiary that yielded well in its first year can disappoint in its third after two other people set up nearby.

The sourced rules on numbers are these. Kenyan practice: a maximum of 20 hives per apiary site, and if you want to keep more than 20 hives, find another apiary site 3 or more km away. US practice: keep a minimum of 3 miles between apiaries to reduce robbing. Those are the same idea in different units. Separate your apiaries by about the foraging radius so their forage circles barely overlap.

Be honest about the status of the 20-hive figure. It is Kenyan extension guidance, not a measured carrying capacity. Real capacity depends entirely on local forage. A site surrounded by flowering Eucalyptus and Croton may carry more. A site in thin dry bush may not carry ten. The rule is a starting point, and your own harvest records over three years are what will replace it.

Beyond forage, a site has to meet a set of physical requirements, and each one has a season attached.

Space to work. You need room to stand beside a hive, swing a smoker, set down buckets, and add more hives later. An apiary crammed into a corner will stay small because there is nowhere to grow.

Access. The sourced requirement is that a site should be accessible by vehicle, with firm dry ground in all months. Read that in an African context and it means one thing: can you get there in the rains? Because the rains are exactly when you cannot, and also exactly when a colony may be starving and need feeding. Walk your access road in the wet season before you commit, not in the dry.

Drainage. The apiary must be above flooding level with adequate drainage. A hive standing in water is a hive with a chilled, damp, mouldy interior and a colony preparing to leave.

Wind. You want wind protection with good air circulation. Those sound contradictory but they are not. You are blocking the strong prevailing wind that rocks hives and chills entrances, while leaving enough airflow that heat and humidity do not sit trapped around the hives.

Fire. The retrieved sources do not cover this, but in savanna it is structurally essential: clear a firebreak around the apiary before the burning season. A grass fire through an apiary destroys everything in minutes, and bush burning is one of the recognised triggers for absconding even when hives survive.

Pesticides. Site away from the downwind edge of sprayed cropland, and build a working relationship with the farmers around you so you get warning before they spray. Application rules and buffer distances are set by your national pesticide regulator, such as the Pest Control Products Board in Kenya or its equivalent in your country. This course names no distance. Ask them.

Finally, security. Site out of casual view. That is the subject of Lesson 5.

Bees need three things from a site that have nothing to do with flowers: water, shade and shelter from wind. Get these wrong in a hot climate and you will lose colonies to absconding without ever understanding why.

Start with water, because it is the one most often forgotten. Bees need water all year round, for cooling the nest and for diluting stored honey so they can eat it. The sourced rule is to provide a water source if none exists within about 100 yards, roughly 90 metres, of the hive.

How much water? A colony may consume up to a gallon of water a day in hot weather. A US gallon is about 3.8 litres. Think about that in an African dry season. Ten colonies at the top of that figure would be moving something like 38 litres of water a day, all of it carried in bee-sized loads by foragers who could otherwise be carrying nectar. Water that is far away is honey you do not harvest.

Build the water point properly, because a badly built one kills bees. Water must be shallow and provided with landing surfaces. Bees cannot swim and they drown in numbers in an open container. Practical designs:

1. A shallow basin or old basin lid filled with gravel or stones so the water only just covers them. The bees stand on stone and drink from the film of water.
2. A drum or bucket with a lid and a slow drip onto a stone or a board, kept wet without ever being deep.
3. Floating sticks, corn cobs or a mat of vegetation on any open water.
4. Site it in shade if you can, or it will evaporate away in a day and the bees will go and find their own.

That last point is the one that causes fights. Siting bees near a neighbour's water source, a cattle trough, a washing place, a water tank, is a classic and avoidable conflict. Bees establish a water habit and thousands of them will keep returning to the same place. If that place is where a woman washes clothes or where cattle drink, you have created a serious dispute and you may lose the site. Give your bees a better, closer, permanent water source before they choose their own, and keep it filled, because if it dries up once they will relocate and you will not get them back easily.

Now shade, and here the sources genuinely disagree, and it is worth understanding why so you can judge advice you are given.

US temperate extension says full sun, or morning sun with afternoon shade, with the entrance facing south to east for early morning warming. Texas extension, being hotter, says morning sun and afternoon shade rather than full sun or full shade. Full sun reduces pests such as small hive beetle and wax moth, while partial shade manages heat.

The disagreement is climatic, not scientific. Cold-climate advice is about warming the colony. Hot-climate advice is about not cooking it. For tropical Africa you take the hot-climate answer, and you should know why. Overheating drives absconding, and it softens comb. Remember the 300 mm comb depth limit from the equipment module and what happens to a heavy honey comb that has gone soft. A hive in full afternoon sun in a hot district is a hive that may lose its combs and then its bees.

So: provide shade during the hottest part of the day, and orient the entrance so the low morning sun reaches it and gets the foragers out early.

And now the mistake that runs through almost every book sold in Africa. The south-facing entrance rule is a northern-hemisphere rule. Its purpose is to catch the low sun. In the southern hemisphere the low sun is in the north. So do not teach or apply a south-facing entrance south of the equator. Reverse it: north and east. Any book that gives you a compass direction without giving you the reason has not thought about where you live.

Shade sources, in order of usefulness. A tree with a light open canopy is best, giving dappled shade that moves through the day. Grass thatch or a raised iron sheet with an air gap above the hive works where there is no tree, but never lay iron directly on a hive because it will radiate heat down into it. Shade cloth on a simple frame is good if you can afford it.

Wind. You want wind protection with good air circulation. A hedge, a woven screen, a line of shrubs on the windward side. The same barrier can do double duty as the flight-path barrier of Lesson 4 and as a visual screen against theft in Lesson 5. One structure, three jobs, is good apiary design.

In most beekeeping books the hive sits on a stand on the ground. In African practice the better default is a hive hung in the air on wire between two posts. This is a distinctively African solution and it solves three problems at once. Learn it as the default and treat the ground stand as the exception.

The sourced Kenyan dimensions are these. Hives are hung between posts set 2 m apart, with the hive 1 m from the ground. Posts are about 2.5 to 3 m long, set in holes about 0.75 m deep. Grease the wires holding the hives to keep off crawling pests. Hang hives securely to prevent the honey badger knocking them down.

Work the post arithmetic so you buy the right timber. A post 3 m long with 0.75 m in the ground leaves 2.25 m standing. The hive hangs at 1 m, so there is 1.25 m of post above the hive. That extra height is not waste. It is what lets you run a wire well above the hive, hang a shade sheet, and keep the hive clear of grass and runoff.

Now why hanging works, problem by problem.

Ants. Ants are a constant, underrated cause of colony loss and absconding in Africa. They walk. They cannot fly to a hive, so if the only route in is along two greased wires, they do not get in. Grease the wire and renew the grease, because dust sticks to grease and after a few months a greased wire is a dusty bridge. Check it monthly and re-grease. A hive on the ground, by contrast, has the whole hive stand and every blade of grass touching it as an ant highway.

Honey badger. The honey badger is powerful, persistent and specifically after your hives. A hive standing on the ground or on a low stand can simply be knocked over and torn open. A hive hung 1 m up on strong wire, tied securely rather than merely resting, is a much harder target. The sourced instruction is explicit: hang hives securely to prevent the honey badger knocking them down. The word securely is doing work there. A hive that lifts off its wire is a hive that comes down.

Grass fire. A hive hung a metre up with cleared ground beneath it stands a real chance in a fast grass fire that would consume a hive standing in the grass. Combine hanging with the firebreak from Lesson 1.

And hanging solves a fourth problem nobody lists: damp. A hung hive is out of standing water and out of the wet grass, and the air moves under it.

Spacing between hives. No sourced spacing figure between individual hives was retrieved, so this course gives none, and you should be suspicious of anyone who quotes one confidently. What you can reason from what is sourced: you need space to manipulate hives and to expand colony numbers, so leave enough room to stand and work at the side of every hive without touching the next one. With defensive African bees, working one hive and disturbing its neighbour at the same time is a real hazard, so err generous. Two posts at 2 m apart per hive already sets a natural rhythm to the row.

A practical layout for a row of hung hives. Set your post pairs so that every hive has clear standing room on the side you work from. Do not put hives in a tight straight line all facing the same direction if you can avoid it, because bees drift between hives that look identical, which spreads disease and confuses queens returning from mating flights. Stagger them, or turn entrances at slightly different angles, or use different coloured lids.

When is a ground stand justified? When you cannot get posts or wire. When the hive is too heavy to hang safely, which can apply to a loaded frame hive. When you are working with elderly or less mobile beekeepers for whom a hung hive is genuinely unmanageable. In those cases, use a stand and defend it deliberately: legs standing in tins of water or old oil, grease bands on the legs, and a heavy or anchored hive that a badger cannot tip. You are trying to recreate by other means what hanging gives you for free.

One last thing. Whatever you hang from, inspect the wire and the fixings before every season. Wire rusts, knots slip, and posts rot at the soil line. A hive that falls at night is a colony lost and a very dangerous situation for anyone who walks past in the morning.

This lesson is not about being a good neighbour. It is about not injuring or killing someone. African bees are documented as notably defensive, defensiveness differs between subspecies and varies with time of day and season, and full protective equipment is not optional. Everything in this lesson follows from that.

Be clear about what this course does not tell you, and why. It contains no number for how far African bees pursue, how many stings they deliver, or how long they stay agitated. The published studies exist, but the underlying numeric assay results were not retrieved. Every such number in circulation, they chase for half a kilometre, they stay angry for twenty-four hours, is unverified here. Do not repeat any of them as fact and do not plan a site on the basis of one. Because the numbers are absent but the hazard is not, safety is taught here as procedure, not as a threshold.

The procedures.

First, position colonies so that flight paths are directed away from traffic, humans and animals. Stand where you intend to put a hive and look along the line the entrance will face. Follow that line with your eye for as far as you can see. If it crosses a footpath, a doorway, a school route, a bus stop, a field where people hoe, or a place where animals are kept, move the hive or turn it.

Second, build a flight-path barrier. The sourced specification is a barrier at least 6 ft, about 1.8 m, high, placed a few feet in front of the hive entrance, to force bees to fly up and over the heads of people. A hedge, a woven screen, a fence, a wall of shade cloth on posts, all work. What matters is the height and the closeness to the entrance. The barrier close to the entrance lifts the flight line immediately, so that from a few metres away the bees are already above head height and stay there. A barrier fifty metres away does nothing.

That single structure earns its cost several times over. It lifts the flight line, it screens the apiary from casual view against theft, and it can double as your windbreak.

Third, and this is the one that causes the worst incidents: tethered and penned livestock are the highest-risk casualty and cannot flee. A person stung by a defensive colony can run. A goat on a rope, a calf in a pen, a cow in a milking crush, a dog on a chain cannot. Never site an apiary upwind of, or adjacent to, a kraal, boma, tethering post or milking area. The animal is not only defenceless, it is also usually somebody's most valuable asset, and killing a neighbour's cow will end your beekeeping in that village whatever the law says.

Fourth, think about who is at the apiary and when. Children investigate. Herders pass through. People cut firewood and graze animals in exactly the kind of bush where you want your apiary. Talk to the people who use the land before you put hives on it, tell them where the hives are, and where you can, put up a simple sign or a thorn barrier that keeps casual traffic away from the entrances.

Fifth, work at the right time. Defensive behaviour varies with time of day and with season. Work late in the day or after dark where local practice supports it. Never open a hive on a hot, still, thundery afternoon during a dearth. That is the worst combination of conditions and it is when incidents happen.

Sixth, never work an apiary alone if you can avoid it, and never without a plan for a mass-stinging emergency. Anaphylaxis and mass envenomation are two distinct medical emergencies. Their clinical management, the sting counts that are dangerous, and the correct first aid are outside this course's sourced scope and are not given here. Obtain that guidance from a qualified medical authority in your own country and build it into your practice before any practical session. Do not let anyone invent a number of stings that is dangerous.

And finally, the legal question. Minimum legal distances from dwellings, public roads, schools and boundaries are set nationally or by local by-law in many African countries and vary widely. This course states no distance, because a wrong distance here could put you on the wrong side of the law or on the wrong side of a serious injury. Ask your national or county agriculture or livestock department, or your national beekeeping association, before you site. Ask before you build the stands, not after. Write down the answer, the date and the name of the person who gave it to you.

An apiary rarely fails all at once. It empties. You set out twenty hives, and over three years you find yourself with eight colonies and no clear idea where the other twelve went. This lesson is about counting your losses honestly, because losses you cannot count are losses you cannot stop.

Start with the honest position on theft. Hive and honey theft is a major risk in African beekeeping and no sourced data on it was retrieved. There is no published rate, no regional comparison, nothing. This course therefore gives you no theft statistic, and if someone quotes you one, ask them where it came from. What the reference does give as the practical answers are fencing and siting out of casual view.

So the ways an apiary empties, with the status of the evidence for each.

Absconding. The entire colony abandons the nest, brood and all, and leaves. It is not swarming: in swarming the parent colony continues, in absconding nothing continues and you lose all of the bees. Absconding is characteristic of African honey bees and is the single largest cause of colony loss in African apiaries. Published absconding rates for African apiaries were not retrieved. That is a real gap, and the right response is to measure your own, which is a better lesson anyway. Documented and inferable triggers: dearth with no forage, pest infestation, ants and honey badger and wax moth, excessive or rough interference by the beekeeper, overheating and no shade, fire and smoke from bush burning, and comb damage during harvest. Every one of those is something your siting and your management control.

Never occupied in the first place. This is the biggest single loss in most new apiaries and it is not a loss at all, it is a planning error. Hives set out are occupied at 40 to 70 percent in one Kenyan report, 30 to 75 percent in another, and about 50 percent in a southern Ethiopian survey where roughly half of all hives stood empty. Eighty percent is regarded as a good target in Kenyan extension. Plan on roughly half your hives being occupied in the first year and count empty hives as a normal cost of the business, not a failure.

Theft. Hives are portable, valuable, and often sited in remote bush precisely so that they are away from people. Unquantified, but real.

Predation and pests. Honey badger knocking hives down. Ants. Small hive beetle, which is explicitly documented as able to cause colonies to abscond entirely. Wax moth in weak colonies.

Fire. Grass fire through an apiary in the burning season.

Weather and flood. Hives in a low spot, in the rains.

Now the practical answers to theft, since the sourced guidance is thin and the reasoning has to carry the weight.

1. Site out of casual view. Not visible from a road, a path, or a hilltop. Most theft is opportunistic and depends on someone seeing hives from a distance.
2. Fence. A thorn boma is cheap and effective and doubles as a livestock exclusion.
3. Make the hives hard to carry. Hung hives tied securely to posts take time and tools to remove. A thief working at night wants speed.
4. Mark every hive permanently and unmistakably: burn or carve your name and a hive number into the timber, on the inside as well as the outside. A marked hive is harder to sell.
5. Keep a written inventory: hive number, date built or bought, date colonised, and where it stands. You cannot report a theft you cannot describe.
6. Involve the community. This is the strongest defence you have and it costs nothing. The people who live and graze around your apiary know who comes and goes. If they have a reason to want your apiary to succeed, whether that is a share of the honey, help with their own hives, or simply respect and information, they will watch it. If they resent you for fencing off bush they used, they will not.
7. Visit unpredictably. An apiary visited every Sunday at the same hour is an apiary a thief can time.

And underneath all of it, the colony record card. Date, hive number, temperament score, brood status, stores, action taken. It is the most valuable piece of equipment in the apiary and it costs nothing but a notebook. When a hive is empty, the card tells you whether it was queenless in March, whether you inspected it three times in a fortnight, whether it had no stores going into the dearth, or whether it was full and healthy last month and the padlock is missing. Without the card, every empty hive is a mystery, and you will repeat the mistake.

This lesson puts the module together as a job of work. Ten hives, one site, from bare ground to bees. Do it in this order, because several of the steps cannot be undone once hives are in place.

Step 1. Survey the forage, before anything else. Walk the 3 km radius and list every flowering tree, shrub and crop, and the month you saw each one flowering. Count every other beekeeper's hives inside that circle, because they draw on the same 2,800 hectares. If the circle is thin on flowering trees, no amount of good equipment will fix it. Move the site.

Step 2. Check the exclusions before you fall in love with the place. Is it out of casual view from roads and paths? Is it clear of homesteads and footpath flight lines? Is it away from any kraal, boma, tethering post or milking area? Is it off the downwind edge of sprayed cropland? Is it above flood level with drainage? Can you reach it in the rains? A no to any of those means find another site, and it is far cheaper to walk away now than after you have set twenty posts.

Step 3. Ask the regulator. Telephone or visit your county or national agriculture or livestock department, or the national beekeeping association, and ask what minimum legal distances apply to hives near dwellings, roads, schools and boundaries where you are. Write down the answer, the date and the name. This course gives no distance.

Step 4. Cut and set the posts. Ten hives hung on pairs of posts means twenty posts, each 2.5 to 3 m long, set about 0.75 m into the ground, in pairs 2 m apart. Ram the soil hard around each one. A post that works loose in the first rains will have to be reset with a colony hanging on it.

Step 5. Water and shade. Set up the water point, shallow with landing stones, in shade, within about 90 m. Establish the shade over the hottest hours, whether that is an existing light-canopied tree, thatch, or a raised sheet with an air gap. Orient the hanging positions so the low morning sun reaches the entrances, remembering to reverse the imported south-facing rule if you are south of the equator.

Step 6. The barrier. At least 1.8 m high, a few feet in front of the entrances, on the side where people are. Hedge, woven screen or shade cloth on posts. Where you can, run it so that it also breaks the prevailing wind and screens the apiary from view. One structure, three jobs.

Step 7. Firebreak. Clear the grass in a wide strip all round, before the burning season, and clear beneath every hanging position.

Step 8. Hang the hives and grease the wires. Tie securely, not resting. Every hive numbered and marked, inside and out. Write the number and position in your inventory book on the same day.

Step 9. Bait and wait. Set the hives before the swarming season, not during it. Swarming season is intensely local. It was observed in July in Kirinyaga and in November in Kakamega, both in Kenya. There is no national swarming season. Find out when yours is by asking beekeepers who have been there thirty years, then record it yourself every year. Rub the inside with beeswax or old comb, shade the hive, and then leave it alone. A bait hive checked weekly is a bait hive that will not be occupied.

Step 10. Plan the first-year crop honestly. Here is where most people go wrong, so do the arithmetic.

1. Ten hives set out. At a first-year occupancy of 50 percent, that is 5 occupied hives.
2. A realistic planning figure for a well-managed African top bar hive is roughly 10 to 20 kg of strained honey per hive per year. Note that this is a synthesis of the Ethiopian and Kenyan evidence and not a single sourced figure, so treat it as a planning range and not a promise.
3. Take the low end, 10 kg. Five occupied hives times 10 kg is 50 kg of honey.
4. Wax at about 10 to 1 for top bar hives: about 5 kg.

Fifty kilograms, not one hundred. If your plan needs one hundred, your plan needs twenty hives or a second year, and it is better to know that now.

And then the second-year arithmetic, which is the encouraging part. The same ten hives at 80 percent occupancy and 15 kg give 8 times 15, which is 120 kg. Same site, same posts, same capital. You did not buy a single extra hive. You got the occupancy up and the management right. That is where the money in beekeeping actually is.