You nailed it! Register your hives, and make sure you are following any local rules/ordinances. In addition to the state being your advocate if there is a neighborly disagreement, there may be some nice fringe benefits. In my area (Tampa Bay), the state works with local mosquito control to identify apiary locations, so they don't fog within 100 meters of the hives.
Hey I am in an urban area and was thinking of buying the flow hive. How do I get the bees? Will they stay? I mean we dont have lush vegetation or anything.
Your best bet is to buy a nucleus colony from somewhere as local as possible. As far as whether you’ll get honey or not, you’d have to try it out and see what happens. What city are you in?
@@jjmcwill1881 I would imagine that you could get a spring/summer harvest in that area. Your best bet is to find a local bee club and see what other people in your location and climate are doing.
Not sure if it has changed but I remember hearing that local laws considered bees as 'livestock' and that livestock needed something like an acre and a half per animal. So, you see where this is going, if you have a single hive and it has 30K bees, you are in trouble. My neighbor for a while had 26 hives. Somebody called the county on him. Neighbors almost behind him had a pool and could always be heard freaking out when the bees came over.
Each city has it's own regulations for livestock. It's a good idea to check your city's website for information on the legality of keeping bees on your property.
Right now it looks like suburban might be the only way forward. I can't find farms and people don't reply to ads. But sometimes I worry about how many colonies is safe to keep in one backyard. This worries me a lot. I hoped you might have some input on it. Thanks.
Great question Noah. My property is about 8k square feet, and I found that three hives was about the max for that much space. Once I got over that, I started having issues with my neighbors. Make sure and get gentle bees too. Don’t start out by catching feral swarms as it can be a real dice roll as far as temperament is concerned. Try to get known good genetics to start out. If you end up with mean bees, that can cause lots of problems.
@@disciple43 Thanks for the reply. I'm surprised that you quoted as low as 3 in just one yard. I'd hoped it was a bit higher. But an honest answer is the best one. Can you bend that a bit with screens and fences both on the property lines and around the bees to not let them see people, yards? The worry over someone going after me as a towns person or neighbor for me having bees, I'll probably not be able to get rid of anytime soon. Do other people worry about stuff like this too? Thanks again. Its fun to talk to other beekeepers.
@@noahriding5780 How many hives you can get away with all depends on your space and who your neighbors are. If you provide water for your bees on your property, that can help keep your bees from using a neighbors pool as a water source. If you can put a fence around the bees and force them up overhead to fly, that’s also very helpful. I had 8 hives on my property last year, and I just had too many complaints from neighbors to keep them in the back yard anymore. I got a land use agreement though so now they’re in an out yard.
It's cute when neighbors slowly build/demo/remodel 24/7 for years but if you have one critter its IMCALLINGTHECITY! Yeah noted the background hammering
Glad it’s helpful! Another word of advice for backyard beekeeping in So-cal. Don’t collect swarms for increasing your apiary unless you have queens ready to requeen the swarm. I caught a bunch of feral bees in 2021 and they ended being Africanized. I ended up having to move all my hives away from my home because of it. Now it’s a 40 minute drive to work vicious and angry bees that won’t take a new queen.
Great questions! I had to move the hives because we couldn’t use the garden boxes with the bees in the middle of the garden. I’ve also stopped worrying about what direction the hives face so much. I have hives facing all different directions and it doesn’t really change much, at least in my climate. That may be different for you depending on your weather.
You can gain a lot of ground by also gardening during hours where the bees are less active. You don't want to be out during the high heat of the day anyway; which is the time the bees most like. But they don't like machinery that's loud or has lots of vibrations, such as edgers, lawn mowers, etc.
Very interesting and informative video. How about swarming? Many get scared by it. How do you manage that? Especially if you don't have good neighbors!
I have super cool neighbors so I just go collect the swarm if it happens. If the neighbors are freaked out about bees though, you have to be super on top of your elate winter/early spring management to prevent swarms.
That's a great question! Bees will often drink pool water, and it doesn't hurt them at all. It's a good idea to provide them with some water on your property too. Lawn and tree fertilizer isn't an issue for the bees, but pesticides can be. Thankfully, there's less pesticide use overall in suburbia on trees and flowering plants than in tree farms and orchards, so it's not as big of a deal for suburban beekeepers as it is for commercial beeks.
We had bees and dogs together. You have to keep them separated though. I had a separate gated area for the bees to keep the dogs out. You also need to keep gentle bees. Don’t catch swarms and put them in the back yard with the dogs unless you’re in an area with no Africanized bees.
Im an urban beekeeper, keeping bees on the rooftop, I don't have problems at day time but during the night my bees goes to the neighbors house if their lights stay lit and have some stinging incidents and some are bad blood neighbors, sometimes i go to serious trouble
This doesn't work in ontario we have ancient laws making it soo hard to meet requirements in a urban area. 25ft from property line 100ft to nearest structure
I have watched a lot of bee RU-vid videos trying to get more insight in to having bees and a small suburban yard. Thanks! Some of the prime locations of my yard (based on your recommendations) have a lot of foot traffic from my son, dogs and wife who gardens. Do you think it’s an issue if the bees are 7ft ish from us walking around, mowing the lawn, hanging out etc?
It depends on which way you face the entrance of the hives. If you're 5-7 feet behind the hives, that's usually fine except for in the heat of the afternoon. They tend to get a bit more defensive for some reason in the afternoon, or at least my bees do. Mowing could definitely be an issue in front of the hive. I manage our bee area separately from the rest of the yard, and I put on a bee jacket and weed whack around the hives in the early evening when the bees are mostly up for the night. However, I was grinding up branches with a really loud mulcher the other day in the afternoon and I was 10 feet behind the hives. They didn't even flinch that time for some reason. If you have curious dogs and kids, you should consider fencing off your bee area so they can't get too close to the hives. We paid $1500 for an emergency vet bill when our little corgi got stung in the mouth.
